Enabling the Entire Community to Guide its Own Future
From homeowners to business owners and goverment leaders, Winning Communities involves all citizens in the community planning process.
The foundation and goal of the Winning Communities process is to help communities envision the kind of community they want to become in the future — from its brand and perception to its recreational, arts and cultural opportunities and social services — and then implement an action plan to achieve it.
The Winning Communities’ 90-Day vision and action planning process helps bring the community leaders and ordinary citizens together to discuss trends, challenges, assets and opportunities within the community. As a group of concerned leaders and citizens, we all work together to explore the assets, challenges, opportunities, and trends as they relate to the community’s future. We’ll develop a vision and mission statement for the community that will guide its actions.
Then we create measurable objectives that focus upon the important issues to the community’s residents, develop ideas for community projects and programs, and identify resources and groups to involve.
Winning Communities then takes all of the combined efforts and information from the community development process and builds it into a strategic vision and action plan for the community to implement. It’s all part of the Certified Winning Community program. Once it’s complete, the community signs a Declaration of Commitment, pledging to uphold and help initiate action toward the objectives in the plan.
Over the years, we have found that this community development approach works best to involve all citizens and community leaders, and to ensure that the true priorities and goals of the community develop as part of the strategic vision and action plan.
