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to IntroductionFrom Measures and Milestones: The Conference Proceedings
pp. 7-17, published 1997
Dr. Ron Hustedde is an Associate Professor in the Rural Sociology Department of the University of Kentucky and has extensive experience in public deliberation, conflict mediation and curriculum development. He has published numerous articles on conflict resolution, conflict mediation and public deliberation. Dr. Hustedde is a charter member of the Kentucky Chapter of the Community Development Society and is on the Board of Directors of the Kentucky Mediation Center. In addition, he is on the National Faculty for the Kettering Foundation’s Public Policy Institutes.
Dr. Lorraine (Lori) Garkovich is a Professor of Rural Sociology in the College of Agriculture at the University of Kentucky. She holds both a BA and an MA in Sociology and a Ph.D. in Sociology/Demography, all from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Dr. Garkovich has been with the University of Kentucky Department of Sociology since 1976.
Dr. Mark Peterson is an Extension Specialist in Community Development with the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service. A native of Iowa, Dr. Peterson came to Arkansas with his wife and two daughters in July of 1989. Prior to that, he was a community development specialist with the University of Missouri Cooperative Extension Service. A past board member of the International Community Development Society (CDS), Dr. Peterson chaired a marketing committee that initiated a marketing/strategic planning effort that addressed major issues facing community development and the CDS through the year 2000. In honor of his support of their community development efforts, the Ponderoso Community Betterment Association named their county road "Mark Peterson Drive." Dr. Peterson received his Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis and Administration from St. Louis University. He is a past chairman of the Network for Leadership Opportunities, an organization dedicated to fostering leadership development opportunities for the citizens of Arkansas. Dr. Peterson has traveled to 20 countries and given professional papers or consultations in several states as well as Germany, Italy, Peru and Canada. He is the author of Harnessing the Power of Vision: Ten Steps to Creating A Strategic Vision and Action Plan for Your Community, as well as other publications. He and his wife Pamela have two children, Rebecca and Katherine. His hobbies include reading, gardening and fishing.
Phil Scharre is a Community Development Specialist with the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Economic Development Group. He is located in Knoxville and has worked at TVA since 1980. Mr. Scharre provides technical assistance to local, regional and state organizations in the TVA region in planning and implementing a variety of economic development and leadership development activities. He is responsible for TVA’s Quality Communities Initiative, which combines total quality improvement principles with strategic planning for economic development. This work has focused on assisting community or regional groups undertake a strategic planning process that helps them build leadership and teamwork, assess their needs, evaluate economic trends, establish goals, outline recommendations for action, and implement projects. This work is typically with rural communities in the seven-state TVA region. Mr. Scharre has also assisted community and regional leadership development programs and designed and facilitated training workshops for economic development organizations. He has managed TVA’s administration of infrastructure grants from the Appalachian Regional Commission and has served as a strategic planning consultant to the National Rural Development Partnership. Mr. Scharre has a masters degree in Urban Planning from the University of Tennessee, a bachelors degree from Eastern Kentucky University, has completed the Economic Development Institute at the University of Oklahoma, and has received training in total quality management and team facilitation methods. He is a native of Louisville, Kentucky.
Moderator, Dr. Ron Hustedde:
I am delighted to be here on this gorgeous November morning to hear our panelists talk about community visions of progress, how they can be shaped, and how we can create a shared vision of the future. Why are these efforts important and necessary? And, how do you get started? How do you do it? Our panelists have done a lot of work in this particular area. Dr. Lori Garkovich is a colleague of mine at the University of Kentucky. She has worked in a number of rural communities, in eastern, central and western Kentucky, and has literally involved hundreds of people in examining their vision for their community and strategic planning, moving forward with an action plan out of that vision. She is one of the most energetic people I know, very well liked, and a gifted teacher.
Mark Peterson I also have known for quite some time. Mark is an unusual community developer in that he is highly gifted in his knowledge of classical philosophers. He has engaged whole communities in talking about Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, and he links that to practical community development. Communities have been pleased with their interaction with him. In recent years, though, he has taken it a step forward. His book called Harnessing the Power of Vision: Ten Steps to Creating a Strategic Vision and Action Plan for Your Community is just a great how-to-do-it manual. He is well known in Arkansas especially for getting communities involved in visioning strategic planning. So, Mark Peterson, it is great to have you in our state.
Phil Scharre is a gifted man, and originally from Louisville. When I was recently at the Aspen Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC, Mr. Scharre’s work with the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Quality Communities Initiative was discussed. It is recognized nationally. They involve people and communities in total quality improvement and strategic planning for economic development.
Dr. Garkovich:
I am a faculty member at the University of Kentucky in the College of Agriculture and my position is in the Cooperative Extension Service. The Rural Development staff in the Rural Sociology program has established over the last ten years what we call the SEED program (Social and Economic Education for Development.) Through that program we have made available to communities throughout the state who request our participation and assistance, a community planning process that has certain principles upon which all of our work with rural communities and urban communities throughout the state is based.
We believe that there needs to be local implementation of all projects. This is not a process where outside experts come in and tell a community what they ought to be doing, but rather the community itself must pull together to create a vision and a plan for the future. It requires broad citizen participation.
We spend quite a bit of time in our visioning process prior to actually doing it. We consider if every geographic area of the community has been identified so that people in those areas have an opportunity to participate in the visioning process. We consider if all age groups have been represented. In all of our processes we’ve involved middle school and high school students who engage in these kinds of vision forums for themselves and articulate their own sense about what they would like the community to be in the future. Our youngest citizen we have trained as a citizen leader was in sixth grade, and our oldest was in her mid-seventies and did all of the visioning sessions at a senior citizen’s center.
We want to build leadership skills for future projects. We are just a few people. We leave. It is essential that any kind of development process involve development of skills within the community. People use words like "social capital," "social resources," and "human capital," but the fact remains when people who have been working with the community leave, they absolutely must leave behind a buildup of the strengths in the community so that they can move on on their own. That is strengthening the community resources for future projects. Finally we want to build on the unique aspects of each community that we are involved with.
The goals of our community planning process then that we offer to communities are four. We want to develop long-range community planning that is based on citizen-defined goals and objectives. Quite often, long-range planning involves experts in a local community getting together and deciding where we ought to be heading. Oftentimes, we say we are doing it in the context that we want to help our community become a better place, but the reality is that all too often we never ask the people who live there what they want for their future. So we want to stimulate the creativity and involvement of local citizens in community affairs.
We believe a premise of our activities is that all communities have within them an enormous wealth of untapped energy and innovation and creativity, and all we need to do is work with the communities to help them unlock their own potential. We need to expand the participation of all residents in community activities, groups, and organizations. Once you begin, it is not an issue of how to keep people engaged, but how to find enough ways for them to remain engaged in that community. Finally, we want to increase collaboration and cooperation among community groups and agencies.
The community planning process involves three steps: creating a community vision for the future, setting goals for the future, and developing an action plan. I am going to focus only on that question of building a vision for tomorrow because that is the place at which people make an intellectual and emotional commitment as citizens to become active members of their community. We point out that successful communities plan for something rather than plan in reaction to something. All too often that’s the history of what we’ve done at the community level. We’ve responded or reacted to situations, rather than plan for a future that we wanted. We encourage communities to understand that successful communities don’t simply react to the problems of today, they act to prevent the problems of tomorrow, and the only way to do that is through effective planning. Successful communities create their own future when their citizens focus on what they want to happen, not just on what is happening.
How often do we hear the phrase, "Well, you can’t stop change, or you can’t change what’s happening, it’s going to happen anyway"? The reality is that communities have shown that with effective visioning and planning they can in fact shape that future. Finally, we believe that a vision blends people’s values and hopes for the future in the context of their current realities. People learn more about their community as they do this process. The community visioning process then is based on the ideas of community members, it maximizes opportunities for community residents to participate in planning for tomorrow, it is community owned and community driven, and it leads to more effective goal setting and action planning by the community as a whole and agencies and organizations within the community.
The basis of this process is what we call a community forum. The reality is that there are only a few of us and there are many large communities. We must establish a mechanism by which people can come together to talk about their future. A community forum is the vehicle and it involves people talking together to build a better tomorrow.
We train local citizens––members of local organizations, the Rotary Clubs, the Chamber of Commerce, the PTA, youth groups such as 4-H, or homemakers in communities––to be group facilitators. Then they go out into a variety of places throughout their community––organizations, schools, and churches––for a period of time, generally six to eight weeks, and people in that county have an opportunity to talk about the same four questions at the same time. That information is returned to us and from that we develop a summary of what has been said and some suggestions about where they can go in terms of planning afterwards.
The key to this is that we train citizens, and it’s neighbors talking to neighbors in situations in which they are comfortable. Our sense is that governments vary in terms of the kinds of opportunities they provide citizens to come and talk to them, but for most of us it’s uncomfortable to go to a formal meeting and make a presentation to a local government, a local board of education, or the parks and recreation department. But we all spend time in our communities talking with our neighbors and our friends about what’s happening here, what we would like to see happen, and where we would like to see changes made. So this process that we’ve developed and implemented in five Kentucky communities involves engaging local people to lead their own discussions about their own future.
We have been averaging between three and six hundred participants in local communities in groups as small as 5 and as large as 15 to be involved in this. Generally, we have 35 to 45 community forums in a community. That’s an amazing commitment in the amount of energy generated for citizen participation in thinking about their future. This afternoon other people will be talking about what happened in their communities and you will see how that visioning process unfolds then into a strategic planning process. Thank you. The challenge is for us to learn in our engagement practices how we deal with and capitalize on the diverse experiences that people bring to the table when they have not been at the table before.
Dr. Peterson:
Good morning. It’s a real honor to be here and to see Ron, Phil, and Lori and my good friend, Larry Dickerson, to be a part of this effort. This is a great facility and it’s an honor to be here. It’s a great time to be alive. There are so many things happening. There is a lot of good work taking place in strategic visioning and benchmarking and with the promise of technology for rural communities, it’s really a time of promise.
"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up that knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa a lion wakes up that knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or gazelle, when the sun comes up you better be running." Do you ever feel that way? Strategic visioning focuses our efforts. We don’t have to take on the world. It focuses our efforts on what we want to become. There are three important principles for a good strategic vision or a good strategic visioning process.
The first step of a good strategic vision or visioning process is that it must be grounded in the history and values of the people of the community. The second principle is that it must engage the community and connect us with each other. The third principle is that it must stretch us beyond our current perspective, forcing us to describe what we want our community to become. The reason I wore this tie is threefold: one is I am happy to be here; secondly, my daughter did the artwork on it, and when she becomes a teenager it will remind me that she was once sweet and innocent; and, thirdly, this is a vision community Joel Barker talked about, that has a shared vision, and people are happier when they have a shared vision.
One of the concepts which has been very helpful for us is a distinction between a quick fix and sustainable development. A quick fix is solving an immediate problem. There are many times when that is really necessary and appropriate. Sustainable development refers to development processes that are socially, economically, and environmentally viable over the long term. As we interacted with communities about this process, it became apparent that it is not one or the other, even though some communities tend to focus on the quick fix. The real challenge is how to initiate a sustainable development process and sustain that over time at the same time as you handle the quick fixes.
There are opportunities you have to deal with that come along with a short window of time and the parameters are already set; those would fit under quick fix. Sometimes a community does not have a good experience working together, or it has not been very active and you can rally people together around a single project, a quick fix, that can be a prelude to a sustainable development process.
There is a power of vision. Vision is a compelling mental image of your desire of the future. It can be a simple idea, something you want to become, a business you want to start, or something your community wants to become; but there is a power of vision because it transports us over the current status quo and our current constraints into a desired future. I will give you an example. A medieval supervisor came to see three stonemasons who were working, and he asked the first one, "What are you doing?" and he said, "I’m cutting a stone." He asked the second person, "What are you doing?" and he said, "I’m working on a parapet." He asked the third person, "What are you doing?" and he said, "I’m building a cathedral that will glorify God for centuries to come." All three were just cutting stone, but the third one had a vision that gave significance to his work and meaning to his life. That is the power of vision.
We talked to David Letterman last night and he gave us the top reasons why your community should initiate a strategic visioning process:
Reason No. 10: Somebody sneezes and dust flies off your old plan.
Reason No. 9: Half of your community doesn’t know if you have a strategic plan.
Reason No. 8: The other half of your community doesn’t care if you have a strategic plan.
Reason No. 7: Your economic base is slipping and there is a general sense that your community is adrift in the global econoy.
Reason No. 6: You know in your heart that your community is capable of great things if it just had a triggering mechanism.
Reason No. 5: Your existing plan is not really a plan, it’s just a list of activities that would be good to do.
Reason No. 4: Your existing plan is not really strategic, it does not build on the unique strengths, capabilities, or location of your community.
Reason No. 3: Your existing plan has no vision. It is a projection of the status quo, rather than a compelling mental image of your desired future.
Reason No. 2: You don’t want to look back on your community ten years from now and wish you had taken action.
Reason No. 1: You realize a strategic vision and action plan that is bold, compelling, and embraced by the entire community is one of the most powerful engines of a community toward a long-term success.
I’ll just give you one example. Delray Beach is a Florida community which has had a history of fights and shouting matches at city council meetings. In May 1988, 100 folks came together and participated in a Vision 2000 Retreat to plan for the future of the community. They put together the Delray Beach Decade of Excellence, with short-term and long-term goals. It spurred economic development and became a model for development in the nation.
There are five requirements for a strategic visioning process:
We put together a publication called Harnessing the Power of Vision that explains the strategic visioning process. Whenever you bring folks together and you talk about their future, once in a while politics gets involved in it. Winston Churchill said, "Politics is more exciting than war because in politics you can get killed many times."
The process that we use is called the Ten-Step Community Process. When we begin the process, people start talking to each other and to the mayor, the city council, the Chamber of Commerce, and the school board, about what can be possible and what they need to do to move the community forward. The question always is: Who needs to be involved? You engage the community and legitimize the process. We don’t work with the community unless the local government officials have endorsed it. First, form an organizational structure, perhaps a steering committee. Some communities conduct a community attitude survey. Develop a strategic vision and action plan. Seek feedback and commitment from the community. Publicize the plan, implement, evaluate, celebrate, and create an ongoing development process.
In the strategic vision and action plan, there is a strategic visioning component in this community development process where we look at the community as a whole, describe a vision, and develop study action teams. The process we use is very simple. We really ask four questions: Where have you been? Where are you now? Where do you want to go? And how will you get there?
In where have you been, we ask the community to describe those critical defining events that have shaped the community to be what it is. Then the community reflects on these events. It supports what has taken place, and acknowledges the hard work that has gone into the community.
Where are you now? We look at socio-economic data, have the folks develop a strategic map, and do an analysis. This is a strategic analysis of northwest Montgomery in Arkansas, and the context within which that part of the county will have to function. Their success depends upon how well they utilize and interact with all these resources, communities, lakes, rivers, and other resources in the future. We ask them to describe where they want to go and describe major forces or trends that will impact the future of the community. Obviously, the Information Age becomes a part of that. Describe your desire for the future and then develop an action plan.
Here’s a quick example of a vision. The Sebascott Economic Development Council developed a vision for that community: Sebascott, the Garden Spot of Western Arkansas, featuring beauty, peace, tranquillity, and economic opportunity for all. They also have a mission statement for their organization. A mission statement is a very focused statement of purpose. A vision is larger, broader, and it is a compelling image of your desired future. Then, after the vision is developed, you identify critical issues and have study-action teams go through a process of deciding what should be done to address all of those issues.
Ultimately, we end up with a chart that says, in economic development, these are the things that we need to do each year, and who’s going to do them and with what resources. A community that does this should have it posted in a lot of places in the community: City Hall and the Chamber and you should see it on billboards. The critical factors are not how smart you are, how much money you have, or how big your town is, but rather if you believe in yourself, are willing to stretch your boundaries, are willing to make technology your friend and not your enemy, and are willing to work together to achieve your desired vision of the future.
I want to share a story about vision. In 473 BC, Persia was the largest and most powerful kingdom in the world. Ahasuarus was the king. He had just deposed his queen, Vashti, because she had dared defy him, and he selected a new queen, Esther. King Ahasuarus’ sidekick Haman, who was a scoundrel, was disappointed because Mordecai, Queen Esther’s older cousin who raised him, would not bow and scrape when he walked through town. So Haman got the king to sign a decree that on a certain day the Jewish people could be killed and their material possessions taken. Mordecai was distraught and was mourning, as all the Jewish people were. When Queen Esther heard about this, she was concerned but didn’t know what to do. At that time they were serious on security. Nobody could come to the King unbidden unless the King put his royal scepter out; if you came to the King unbidden, and he did not put his royal scepter out, you would be killed. Mordecai sent a message to Queen Esther: "This is your time, you are in an important position, and the future of our people depends on you." She went to the King and he held out his scepter and they were able to resolve that issue. I say to all of you here: This is your time, you are in important positions, and the future of your community depends upon you. Thank you.
Phil Scharre:
Thanks very much. It’s good to be here. It’s always good to be back in the home state. I’m a native of Louisville and graduated from Eastern Kentucky University, so I’m very familiar with this part of the world. I think Ron, Lori, and Mark have really explained beautifully some of the rationale for visioning, why communities need a shared vision, why it’s so important to engage and involve people, as well as giving us some excellent tips on the steps involved in conducting the vision and planning process. Their processes look very good.
There are a lot of visioning and planning approaches. The basic elements are common to most of them but when you conduct these processes with your communities, tailor the approach to meet your specific community situations and start where your community is, because all communities are in a different position.
I’ll start my presentation with just a few ideas on why visioning and planning processes sometimes don’t work as successfully as we would want them to. Some have worked well, some have worked OK, and some worked for a while.
That will lead to a description of TVA’s Quality Community Process, which we hope addresses some of these problems. Sometimes when you get planners involved there’s too much emphasis on the final plan or document. We get obsessed with making the perfect plan. Sometimes the planning process is too long. A really good contribution to the strategic planning process in the last few years has been problems first, instead of talking about the vision for the future and making it a positive and compelling vision. Often you don’t build that important capacity for teamwork and consensus decisionmaking. We need to improve the capacity of leaders and citizens to work together as teams and to use consensus decisionmaking techniques.
Sometimes those doing the planning are not involved in the implementation of the plan. Often not enough widespread community support is garnered, there is no responsible entity or owners of the planning process, and no clearly established expectations. Then a couple of months down the road you find out that people have different expectations about what this planning and visioning process is about. Another reason why these processes sometimes fail is not celebrating even minor successes that may happen very soon, or even during the planning process. It’s very important to celebrate and recognize success.
Monitoring and publicizing results in the years to come is very important, as well as coordinating and collaborating among the groups to get everyone involved in the sharing of the vision. When you start to design your community visioning processes, think of some of these reasons why they don’t work and try to design a process that will address some of those ideas.
In the remaining few minutes, I’ll discuss TVA’s Quality Community Initiative, a strategic planning process that we’ve done with communities around the TVA region. TVA serves parts of seven states and about 200 counties, and we offer this as part of our economic development assistance program. It’s based on a few premises. A quality community is one that
Two key words are teamwork and continuously improve because we often don’t build a capacity for teamwork in doing these sorts of processes. We also often concentrate on a few successes, get all excited, and accomplish a few things. Then a couple of years later it falls apart, and five years down the road we are wondering whatever happened to it. It is very important to continuously improve every aspect of the community and make progress. The basic philosophical underpinning of quality communities is that various people in the community have ideas and information necessary for improvement, but an environment must be created in which these ideas can be surfaced and tried. That’s the role of community leadership, and the purpose of a visioning planning process is to create that environment, to get people involved, to engage people, and to get their ideas out and to try their ideas.
Rick Smyre, a planning consultant, talks about communities of the future a lot. He says that communities of the future that are progressing are characterized by leaders who are open to new ideas, by networks instead of hierarchies, and by pools of men and women who understand the facts and enjoy the trust of citizens that are committed to teamwork. Any visioning process should try to achieve this and try to build a community that has that.
I show this to a lot of communities and ask them if their community looks like this. Most people nod their heads. These arrows are various sectors of the community: education, government, agriculture, tourism, health sector, whatever, all working very hard to improve their part of the community, but probably not working in unison toward some shared goals and shared visions of the future. Typically, communities look like that, and ideally, we would like to look a little more like this. We would like to have citizens and leaders in the various sectors of the community working toward some shared goals.
What is the quality community’s process? It’s that in a nutshell. Four phases that we take communities through. Our role is to facilitate the process based on the premise that the experts about the community are the folks who live in the community. We are offering a process to help bring that expertise to light and to action. We stole from Dr. Demming a good way to illustrate the continuing nature of the planning and improvement process for communities. One thing that we often want to jump over––we want to get right to the planning and some action––is getting it all organized, making sure we’ve spent enough time on the planning-to-plan phase, and this can take a few months sometimes to make sure your community has outlined the right process, that you haven’t just adopted a consulting suggestion for your steps to go through, but that you have designed it based on your community. Nancy Stone in Simpson County, and Michael (Bransford) and Rita (Mitchell) from Fulton, have done a very good job with that. The organized phase is getting partners involved, designing the actual planning process.
The heart of it, of course, is the planning phase, where we do some team building up front with the planning group, the quality council that we pull together, which has to represent a broad cross section of the community. We do some visioning with them, some team building work, a series of workshops, and always try to get some public input through a series of public community meetings. Sometimes these go really well, and sometimes not so well. In some communities we work with well over 300 or 400 folks involved in a series of community meetings, asking a series of questions similar to what Lori and Mark have talked about—where the community is, where it needs to go—and engaging people in that dialogue about the future, not just holding public hearings.
The final plan does not have to be something very large or terribly complex. It can be as simple as a brochure or a poster sometimes, as long as it gets people doing something, again toward a shared vision of the future. Again, we borrowed a lot of tools and techniques from total quality improvement that business and industry have used. Total quality improvement is really just a philosophy of management as well as some problem-solving tools. We tried to take some of those tools and techniques that help people work together better, examine problems, and do some planning to solve those problems.
I know that is a quick overview of the process, which can take anywhere from a few months to six months or longer. Guard against taking too long in doing a visioning and planning process because folks get burned out and most of us are geared toward some action pretty soon. I am glad Mark mentioned he put up a vision and a mission that a community had worked on. One of the toughest things when we do the visioning statement process is getting folks to understand the difference between a vision and a mission because we all tend to be very mission oriented. A vision is what we want to be; a mission is what we are going to do.
It’s sometimes hard to get folks to take that time necessary to look at what they want to be in the future. That’s one of the things that a vision process helps folks do: bring the community values to light and help people understand that maybe they have been fighting with each other for years and have different ways of looking at and doing things, but they really have a lot of the same shared values and shared vision for the future.
I’ll close with a couple of thoughts. We have been doing this strategic planning for a long time with communities and it seems things happen not necessarily according to the plan that we have carefully prepared, but because of the planning. Several years down the road, if you look at what happened as a result of the visioning and planning process, a lot of things may have happened that weren’t spelled out in the plan, but they happened because of the planning you went through during the visioning and civic engagement process. That’s a real benefit.
One final thought on visioning is we can sometimes get caught up in creating a perfect vision statement for the future. It’s not what the vision is; it’s what the vision does. Does it compel people to action, pull people together, or make things happen? That’s very important to remember. It’s not what the vision is, but what it does. Does it bring folks together?
Audience Member:
I’ve been through several visioning processes, some that really didn’t engage government. How do you get government involved when they may not see a need for it, and may even feel threatened by the whole process?
Dr. Garkovich:
I think there’s two things: First, the planning process cannot be initiated from outside the community, rather from within. Things that are done to communities don’t work, so from our perspective, success begins when the process is initiated from within the community. Secondly, the planning for the process is as important as the outcome, and that means getting the stakeholders to the table, not only the local people in terms of citizens, representatives of agencies and organizations, but also getting people who are the ultimate decision makers to the table also, and that occurs in the beginning.
Audience Member:
Southern Kentucky is the only one of the five regions in the state that does not have a state university and as we go through our visioning process often I’ve heard people say, "Why can’t we have higher education in the southern region when there are Eastern Kentucky University, Western Kentucky University, Northern Kentucky University, and the southern region has only a two-year community college that does not have enough classrooms?" We’ve asked for a student center with a cafeteria and classrooms and a group of people, our legislators, the President of the College, the Mayor of Somerset, and a lot of other people have gone to Frankfort and had a meeting with the Governor. Now how do we get some action?
We did the visioning process here in Pulaski County and that was one of the key questions that came out, one of the goals that was established, or articulated, by a large number of people. We talked about it in different kinds of groups within the county. I think what you’ve been doing is the way you can do it. Communities to some degree have control over the things that affect them, but there are some decisions that are made that they cannot necessarily influence, although joining together does build strength.
I heard the Governor’s Inaugural Address, in which he said, "I’m from eastern Kentucky, but I will govern the state: the east, the west, the north, and the south, the rural and the urban, the Democrats and the Republicans." And, now it hasn’t been done because we’ve asked for some of these hundreds of millions of excess dollars for a building here at our community college. Our local people are working on changing the name of this Somerset Community College to what it has become, a Southern Kentucky Community College. The President says it has become regional since he has been President. The enrollment has more than doubled, and there are students here from many southern Kentucky counties. They have off-campus centers in Laurel and McCreary Counties, and I just don’t understand any good reason why our need for higher education is being ignored.
Dr. Peterson:
A lot of communities say that their problem is that they don’t have enough resources and usually it’s because they don’t have a good vision. Visions attract resources. You are on the right track starting with a vision. Also, as Lori said, band together with other folks, explore a lot of different options, and we are fortunate to live where you have a chance to vote.
Dr. Hustedde:
We have had a lot of common themes among our three speakers: that if visioning, strategic planning is going to work, it has to be locally driven and designed; you have to work on building commitment, including government, and building networks, building consensus on who we are, who do we want to be. Focus on who you are and what your strengths are as a community. Again, focus on locally defined goals and efforts. Another component I heard among the speakers was there needs to be some time to celebrate the accomplishments of strategic visioning, strategic planning, and to stop and take the time to do that. Celebrate the goodness of the community.
Thank you very much for traveling long distances: Arkansas; Knoxville, Tennessee; Lexington. I am pleased to be with you all today.
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