Editorial
Front Page - Friday, September 4, 2009
Chattanooga Stand working to make community visions a reality
Samara Litvack
When Hamilton County Mayor Claude Ramsey announced to the Rotary Club that Volkswagen Group of America was coming to Chattanooga, he challenged audience members to start thinking about the future of their city. Three members of that audience took that message to heart and carried the conversation to their own communities and neighborhoods. Before long, their conversation grew into a community visioning effort, aimed at uncovering the questions and concerns of people in and around the Chattanooga area.
Research was done to develop effective data-gathering methods, and previous efforts, in Chattanooga and other areas, were analyzed to see what had worked and what had not. The result: the Chattanooga Stand campaign, a survey-based visioning effort, planned and driven by community members with a common goal.
Stand began administering its open-ended, four-question surveys on May 3 of this year. Question one: What do you like about the Chattanooga region? Question two: Imagine the best possible Chattanooga region. Describe it. Question three: What challenges must be addressed? Question four: What actions, big or small, can you take to help?
Already, more than 17,000 responses have been collected from people of all walks of life who all have one thing in common – they care about the future of Chattanooga.
With an ultimate goal of 25,000, campaign coordinator Sarah Lester expects to reach 19,000 responses by the end of August.
“Nineteen thousand is significant because that will make this process the world’s largest survey-based community visioning project,” she says. “The imagineCalgary Process in Alberta, Canada, currently holds that title with over 18,000. So we’re getting very excited.”
Through partnerships with the Chamber of Commerce, city and county staff, the Department of Education and employers, big and small, Chattanooga Stand is administering its surveys through every imaginable avenue.
“We’re trying to reach them at work and then also while they’re at play,” says Lester. “We’re trying to go to anypublic event and trying to find people where they’re gathered.”
Campaign staff has been seen all around town in bright yellow t-shirts – at Nightfall, the Chattanooga Market, Riverbend and other community gathering sites – and is working with several city councilmen to host barbecues, targeting areas that have been underrepresented in data collection.
The only personal identifier required on the survey is the participant’s zip code. Lester says this helps Chattanooga Stand track what parts of the region are being accessed and which ones haven’t yet had their voices heard.
Any community or organization holding an event can contact Chattanooga Stand at 423-648-6499 to request the campaign’s presence. The survey can be taken by phone at the same number, and is available online at www.chattanoogastand.com. Surveys are also on hand inside the campaign headquarters, located at 55 East Main Street, inside the CreateHere studio.
“Stand was started by residents but needed a lot of day hours,” says Lester. By designating the Create Here building as its headquarters, the Stand campaign secured manpower, physical space for the campaign and organizational resources at its disposal.
Chattanooga Stand staff is working in conjunction with the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies, which is entering the collected data and coding it into categories. From that, more specific subcategories will be produced and an analysis will be done when all 25,000 surveys are complete.
“That will take place in the fall and we expect first quarter of 2010 to bring those results back out,” says Lester. The information will be available in executive summary form, divided by zip code and completely accessible to the public.
“We’ll use identifying top themes and priorities to engage further discussions, use that as a chance to facilitate a more in-depth dialogue,” says Lester.
The end goal for Chattanooga Stand is to identify the concerns of the community, rally support for revolutionizing those issues and use its contacts and community support to address them.
“This isn’t just results to hand off to one sector or one entity and say, ‘Go forth and solve,’” says Lester. “We have to create the future. We have a sense of ownership.
“We have to work on these things together. It’s hopefully going to shape all of our attitudes toward what needs to be done in the future.”
To find out more about Chattanooga Stand, to volunteer with the campaign or to take the survey, call, visit the Web site or be on the lookout for the effort’s bright yellow shirts and campaign
paraphernalia at a community event
near you.
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