Back to Forging a Community VisionFrom Measures and Milestones: The Conference Proceedings
pp. 19-32, published 1997
Dr. Penny Miller is an Associate Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Political Science at the University of Kentucky. She received her BA, MA, and Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. Dr. Miller is a member of the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars, the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center Board of Directors, the Kentucky Center for Public Issues Board of Directors, and the Kentucky Women’s Leadership Network. She has served as Chair of the Kentucky Commission on Women and a member of the Kentucky Supreme Court Gender Fairness in the Courts Monitoring Committee and has been a TV, radio, and newspaper election analyst for Kentucky and national stations and publications. Dr. Miller is the co-author of two books, The Kentucky Legislature: Two Decades of Change and Political Parties and Primaries in Kentucky and author of Kentucky Politics and Government: Do We Stand United?. She was a member of the National Women’s Advisory Committee for Clinton and Gore. She and her husband, Bob, have two adult children and two granddaughters.
Jeanne Gage has more than 13 years of experience in community development. Her background includes public policy research, fundraising, strategic planning, organizational development, and community organizing. The National Development Council certifies her as an Economic Development Finance Professional. Prior to her current position, Ms. Gage was associate director of Eastern Kentucky University’s Center for Economic Development. Ms. Gage has served in a number of volunteer positions, including two years as president of the League of Women Voters of Kentucky. She has a degree in philosophy from Berea College. Ms. Gage is director of sustainable communities at the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (more widely known as MACED) in Berea, a regional organization which provides opportunities and resources to help citizens build sustainable, healthy, equitable, democratic and prosperous communities in Kentucky and Central Appalachia. Since its creation in 1976, MACED has combined research and policy analysis with technical assistance and financial investments to stimulate development that benefits low-income households.
Billie M. Sebastian received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Kentucky. From 1988 to 1993, Ms. Sebastian worked with the Legislative Research Commission and the Long Term Policy Development Committee, which designed the concept of the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center. In August 1993, she joined the Center’s staff where she has worked with the Scanning Kentucky and Visioning Kentucky’s Future initiatives. In June 1997, Ms. Sebastian was invited to address the Visión: Monterrey 2020 conference in Monterrey, Mexico. She has been a certified foster parent since 1988 and has served as First Vice President of the Kentucky Foster Care Association and twice was a delegate to the National Foster Parent Association annual conference. She is a past president of the Franklin County Humane Society, has served on the Board of Directors of two Kentucky Arabian organizations, and has served as event staff for 11 U.S. National Arabian Championship Horse Shows. Ms. Sebastian is a member of Memorial Baptist Church in Frankfort, Kentucky.
Nancy S. Stone is the Executive Director of the Franklin-Simpson County Chamber of Commerce. Prior to her work there, Ms. Stone served on the broadcasting and news staff of Franklin Favorite-WFKN, Inc. She is a Board Member of Kentucky Chamber of Commerce Executives and West Kentucky Corporation, serves on the Consulting Committee for Communities of the Future, is a Site Visit Team Member of the Kentucky Industrial Development Council, and serves on the Barren River Area Development District Transportation Council. She has also served on the Boards of Directors of the Kentucky Council on Child Abuse, Franklin Simpson Memorial Hospital, the Simpson County School-Community Partnership, the Mammoth Cave Regional Foundation, and the Cave Region Matching Funds Committee. Ms. Stone has served as Chairman of the Simpson County Bicentennial Committee, the Simpson County Tourism Commission, the Simpson County Historic Properties Trust, and the Mammoth Cave Regional Foundation. She is a graduate of Portland High School in Portland, Tennessee, and attended Vanderbilt University. Ms. Stone is a graduate of Leadership Kentucky and the Kentucky Institute for Economic Development, and completed the University of Georgia Institute for Organization Management. She was recognized as the Woman of the Year in 1991 by the Business and Professional Women’s Club, and received the School Bell Award from the Kentucky Education Association and the Community Service Award from the Simpson County Extension Service.
Dr. Edward Yager is an Assistant Professor of Government at Western Kentucky University. He worked in California local government for five years before earning his Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Dr. Yager has presented several conference papers on strategic planning and local economic development and has published articles on the same theme, including a recent article in the Economic Development Review examining university technical assistance to strategic plans for local economic development. He is a former President of the Kentucky Political Science Association (1996-97) and currently serves on several community committees, including the Mayor’s Select Committee on Local Government Policy, the Communities of the Future Project, and the International Relations Committee of the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce. He is finishing his sixth academic year at Western, where he teaches courses in American government and public administration. He and his wife, Marie, have two children in elementary school.
Moderator, Dr. Penny Miller:
I am Vice Chair of the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center Board. We are extremely pleased to have all of you with us this morning. We are now going to focus on efforts that are taking place in Kentucky and examine successful efforts at the local, state, multi-county and county-wide levels of initiatives. We also have geographical distribution, as we will be examining things occurring in Bowling Green, Simpson County, south central Kentucky, and statewide initiatives dealing with visioning.
We have a very impressive and caring panel. Instead of taking the time to introduce them in great detail, please read their bios, which are enclosed in your packets. They are very impressive people and have been long involved in efforts of strategic planning and helping their communities and the state. Dr. Edward Yager, Assistant Professor of Government at Western Kentucky University, will start off this panel. His research interests focus on local economic development capacity issues, and he has come this morning to talk about the visioning efforts that have taken place in Bowling Green.
Dr. Yager:
Good morning. I am honored to be here this morning and to address you on a very important and timely topic. In Bowling Green, we have a Communities of the Future initiative and this initiative has essentially two objectives. The first objective is to foster increased citizen participation and shared vision on community issues. The second objective is to try to introduce a longer-term perspective on those community issues.
The Communities of the Future program is premised upon a growing body of research that strongly suggests that community collaborative initiatives are an effective means of addressing community issues; but, moreover, it contributes to what has been described as social capital or social infrastructure––important elements of trust in working relationships between individuals within a particular community. Scholars such as Robert Putnam out of Harvard, Chris Larsen, syndicated columnist Neal Pearce, and others have done substantial research in this area that have developed these results.
The Communities of the Future project is sponsored by the Bowling Green-Warren County Chamber of Commerce in partnership with the City of Bowling Green and Western Kentucky University’s Institute for Economic Development. Those are the major sponsors of the Communities of the Future program, which is not limited to Bowling Green, but includes 30 communities across 15 states that have their own Communities of the Future visioning programs. With the assistance of Rick Smyre, a consultant from North Carolina, a steering committee was organized and has met to establish direction and strategies for community consensus building and team building.
Most recently, a neighborhood leadership initiative by the City of Bowling Green, spearheaded by Chuck Coates, is an important component of the Communities of the Future Program. This initiative entails the identification of leaders in neighborhoods throughout the city who will work with a municipally funded neighborhood liaison officer that will provide a conduit for information between the city and the neighborhoods. The liaison officer will also work with various neighborhood leaders to develop their skills in consensus building on important priority issues that need to be addressed, such as the reduction of drug use, illiteracy, or day care. Those priorities will be identified in neighborhood forums led by a leader selected by the neighborhood, rather than a municipal worker, but that leader will be trained in facilitation skills and consensus building techniques by the city employee. We are pretty excited about this initiative and the employee will be hired in the first week of December.
A second element in the Communities of the Future program is actually within the city bureaucracy. Mr. Coates has implemented consensus building within management ranks. He believes that he will be able to identify successful strategies and techniques within the city bureaucracy that will have some relevance as well to community consensus building through the Communities of the Future Program.
Finally, I recently returned from an intensive four-day workshop sponsored by Interaction Associates. This is an international consulting firm for providing facilitation skills, team building techniques, and consensus building techniques. Most of their clients are Fortune 500 companies. Teamwork is important within private sector corporations in order to reach organizational objectives, but many of those principles are also relevant to community consensus building. I am looking forward to employing what I learned at that workshop in working with the neighborhood liaison officer and various private citizens within the neighborhoods of Bowling Green. There’s been substantial research in this area that has been able to identify civic benefits, that is, a closer engagement between citizens and their government derived from community consensus building, but also economic development benefits derived from this process as well.
I would like to emphasize a number of case studies that are available in two books. The first book, Collaborative Leadership, How Citizens and Civic Leaders Can Make a Difference, was authored by professors and consultants from the University of Colorado and has a number of case studies where community collaboration works. They emphasize the civic benefits; that is, citizen engagement on political issues, much of what Governor Patton was talking about earlier this morning, connecting government with citizens through community collaborative processes. But economic benefits can be derived as well. That’s the subject of the second book, Grassroots Leaders for a New Economy, written by economic development consultants out of Silicon Valley, but it features cities emphasizing community collaboration for economic development. I would strongly endorse both of these books and the case studies that are presented. Thank you.
Dr. Miller:
How many of you are currently involved in a local visioning initiative at the city level? The county level? Multi-county initiative? Statewide? And how many folks do we have from state government that have strategic planning within their departments? All of those reports and strategic planning efforts were instrumental to our Center’s visioning efforts. Our next panelist will be talking about citizen-based visioning efforts that have been done at the multi-county level. Jeanne Gage is Director of Sustainable Communities at MACED.
Ms. Gage:
Thank you. The acronym MACED stands for the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development. I am going to talk about MACED’s sustainable communities initiative which I direct. There are two goals of this initiative. The first is to demonstrate that a community’s ability to come together and cooperate for the common good is the primary factor in determining how successfully it will address the challenge of sustainable development. Earlier Governor Patton referred to this ability as civic capital. A lot of people call it social capital or social capacity, but what we are talking about is people coming together and cooperating for the common good.
The second goal is to develop a long-term strategy for sustainable community development decisionmaking at the local level through the creation and support of citizen-based action teams. Our sustainable communities initiative is currently testing this model with two county-level action teams located in Letcher and Owsley Counties in Kentucky. The Owsley action team has been around since 1992 and the Letcher County action team since 1996. As we work with both of these groups, we are developing this model using what we have learned and actually we’ve gotten so much interest in this that we will probably be launching into a national effort. When the panel was introduced, they said we were going to talk about successful efforts and we won’t know if this is successful for a number of years, but we feel confident that we are heading in the right direction.
Our initiative is based on the belief that there are three basic dynamics operating within communities and though these aren’t the only dynamics, we think they are very important to what happens in communities. The first is economy. Economy is the management and use of resources to meet household and community needs. The second dynamic is ecology, which is the pattern of relationships between living things and their environment. The third dynamic is equity. Equity is about treating people with fairness and dignity. We call these the Three Es of sustainable development.
The way MACED defines sustainable development is as a process of making decisions that consider the long-term effects on the economy, ecology, and equity of communities. The goal of sustainable development is to develop each community’s ability to be healthy and prosperous over the long term. What does all this have to do with community-based visioning? MACED has developed ten steps, which are described in more detail in the booklet, Communities by Choice: An Introduction to Sustainable Community Development.
One of the steps in the 10 steps is to share a vision of the future. So I am going to focus on that step specifically. But, before we can create a shared vision of the future, we need to ask a couple of questions. The first is, if we are going to come together and cooperate for the common good, what is the common good? We have to be able to answer that question for our own communities. The second question is, who is "we"?
We chose the action-team model as a vehicle for addressing these questions. The action-team models that we are working with in Owsley and Letcher Counties are both operating from a basic set of principles. Action teams are citizen-based, nongovernmental organizations. One of the ones we are working with is incorporated; the other isn’t. They are inclusive. They believe, as an old Quaker saying goes, everybody has a piece of the truth.
They are willing to address long-term issues. They haven’t come together around a specific problem, but to look at long-term issues. They use consensus decisionmaking and that’s not just majority vote. You have to have general agreement of a representative group of people before you can move forward with an issue. They believe in shared responsibility and empowerment, so they don’t just have a few people or staff members doing everything, but they share the work and they share the rewards.
They meet at least monthly. They use action learning, which is learning by doing. They involve action team members by conducting research and going on trips and they are trying to get beyond the flip chart, just sitting and brainstorming, writing it all up, and spitting it back out. They are proactive, not reactive. They understand the difference between development and growth. We talk about this difference more in the Communities by Choice booklet.
They cultivate trusting relationships between people on the action teams and with organizations and elected officials within the community. They consider the impact of their decisions on other communities because there are a lot of decisions that we can’t make in a void. We all share air, water, and other things that cross political boundaries, so they think about how their decisions affect other communities. They are flexible and accountable for their actions.
In the community-based visioning with the action teams, we started by asking a couple of basic questions. You can ask different questions and get at the same issues, but these are the questions that we have asked. What is important to our community? In answering that question, you end up getting a list of the community’s values. We think these values are key to future decisionmaking. They are also key to developing the vision of the future. We also ask, what are the criteria that we want to use for development decisions? These become a list of principles. We ask, what do we want to be? This will be the community’s vision. Then, is this where we are currently headed? This helps identify what needs to change.
Both of our action teams have gone through this process and they have kept working until they each formed a set of values, a set of principles, and their mission statement. Every time the action teams make decisions, they refer back to these to ensure that they are meeting the common values and principles that they have agreed upon.
One thing to consider is that the purpose of the visioning process is to capture people’s hearts and imaginations, not just to get a vision statement. If you can’t get people excited about thinking about the future and what is possible, then you are not going to have any action on that vision. A vision is not just what you can see in your head that you want that community to be like. It’s about the character of communities and about how communities function. It’s hard to visualize equitable relationships in a community, but you need to think about what are the characteristics and personality of our community, and what do we want it to be like?
A shared vision is not the same as a vision that is shared. You don’t want a small group of people to get together, form a vision, and then broadly share it with the rest of the community and call it a shared vision. You really need to involve a broad segment of the community. There are different ways to do that. Not everybody likes to come to meetings and that’s not the only way to involve people. You can use newspapers, radio shows, the Internet, field trips and plays, and other things to involve people in thinking about their community.
When gathering information, you need to distinguish between facts and opinions. I’ve gone through several visioning sessions with groups where everybody gets together and gives their opinions on what’s happening and then decides what they want to happen. If it’s not based on this common information base, you can head off in a lot of unproductive directions. You need to focus on what is possible, to be able to turn the "we can’t"s into "how can we?"s in your facilitating of the process. You need to be intentional about who "we" is and make sure that the group you brought together is broadly representative of the community, that there is a broad range of views at the table. Otherwise, you are not going to develop a shared vision.
Creating a vision is not about making one choice. It’s about a pattern of choices over a long period of time. So you need to make sure that you don’t focus too much on creating one vision, but rather on how you make thoughtful choices over time, and that you establish a process to continue to keep those choices thoughtful.
Finally, visions must lead to actions; if they don’t, it was a waste of your time. We think that’s why the action-team model works, because you have a group that can take that vision and begin to act on it. T. S. Elliott once said, "In dreams begin responsibilities." I have another famous quote I’d like to share with you from Shel Silverstein. This is a poem called Woulda-Coulda-Shoulda. "All the Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas Layin’ in the sun, Talkin’ ‘bout the things They woulda-coulda-shoulda done... But those Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas All ran away and hid From one little did." We think our action teams are turning into little dids and we would like to see more of that happening in Kentucky.
Dr. Miller:
Thank you. Our next panelist, Nancy Stone, is a real doer in Simpson County and she’s going to tell you about the visioning efforts that they designed and launched there.
Ms. Stone:
I am so glad to be here. Thank you for having me today. I am the Director of a Chamber of Commerce in a very small community, Franklin, in Simpson County. Bowling Green and Warren County is not the last place that you exit on I-65 going into Tennessee; it is Franklin in Simpson County. The state of Kentucky does not end at Bowling Green, and Chuck (Coates) would disagree.
I’m going to talk about a community visioning process from the most basic level, a small rural community that still has its economic growth partially embedded in agriculture, and about the practical application of an existing community visioning program. We used two different programs within our community that led us to our new enthusiasm and a whole new outlook. I am here to talk from the perspective of where the rubber meets the road. In order for you to know about our community visioning process that we began the preparation for about three years ago, you have to know why.
By most standards, Simpson County is considered a successful community. We’ve had more than our share of industry since the 1950s. And even though we are the twelfth smallest county in the Commonwealth, we rank twelfth in the production of corn and soybeans, among other things. So you can see that agriculture and industry are both very important to us. Three years ago, a poultry-processing plant announced it would locate in our community. We were going to have 1,600 new jobs and a brand new market for all of that grain. I’m not sure that everyone understands that when these live animal farms and these processing plants enter into our state, they are coming into the western part of the state because they want the grain. Most of them will have their own feed mill with them because they have a formula which helps enhance and speed up the growth process. So, we felt we had the best of both worlds with this particular industry. It seemed so right that the officials and the people that worked on it were absolutely stunned when they found out that there was very strong local opposition. The opposition ultimately forced our city officials to withdraw their support and ultimately kill the project. Environmental groups founded most of this opposition.
All of this came on the heels of a legalized liquor referendum that was hotly contested and defeated. How many of you are from small rural communities? You know that nothing stirs the blood in Kentucky in a small rural community like a liquor issue. When the dust cleared following these two fiascoes, our community was left devastated. Neighbors and family members weren’t speaking. We were at probably the lowest point that I can remember in the 30 years that I have lived in the Franklin-Simpson County community.
The Chamber decided that we had to take the initiative to try to lead the community in some way to help them repair the damage that had been done. So, in the heat of all of these things, we approached the City Commission and the Fiscal Court. We asked for their endorsement to seek out projects that would help us to achieve those goals that we had set. They did endorse it, but the caveat was that it was not to cost them anything. We were welcomed whatever we wanted to do.
Our first goal was to open up communication within our community. We wanted people to start talking to each other again and try to heal some of those wounds. Secondly, we wanted to offer a really frustrated small community the chance to have a voice in its development. I am from Tennessee, about 12 miles down the road from Franklin, but we do live on I-65. Franklin is located on I-65; Nashville is about 35 minutes to the south of us, and Bowling Green 15-20 miles to the north of us. Both are experiencing unprecedented growth. That growth is beginning to press in on our small community.
The change is happening, and small communities really have trouble when change is inevitable. People feel frustrated and feel as if they are losing control. We felt that our community was experiencing that in a very strong way. So we wanted to give them a voice in the development of our community as it was beginning to be noticed. As luck had it, we tapped into the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce Certified Community Partnership Program that was offered to Chambers and we were one of the first five communities to be chosen to participate in that new program, which replaced the old Certified Cities Program.
Then we found another program called the TVA Quality Communities Program. You’ve heard Phil Scharre and you will also hear Tom Forsythe today. Either one of them could drive into Franklin, and they got to be such regular visitors to our area that they were almost on a first-name basis with everybody in our community. The police and the McDonald’s people knew them.
The good news about these two programs was that we did begin to regain our enthusiasm and we did heal some old wounds. That enthusiasm has not diminished. The program has forced us to take a very long, hard look at ourselves and helped us find our place again in the scheme of things for south central Kentucky and north central Tennessee. It has enabled us to focus on our future in a very positive way.
First, the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce asked us to do a thorough analysis of our community. We set up a team with broad-based leadership and knowledgeable participants and did a very thorough job on that analysis. We exposed warts and all and were brutally honest about our problems. If you have followed The Courier-Journal or the Bowling Green Daily News for the last 15 years, you know that we have had a very colorful political history in our community, and we were honest in our assessment of that situation along with other problems. The process in itself is cathartic, to be perfectly honest about all your problems, put them in black and white, and hand them over to a resource team of strangers. I was very proud of our group for the effort that they put into that.
The Kentucky Chamber put together a resource team, studied our analysis, and came back with suggestions. One was a community visioning process. Enter the TVA, Phil Scharre, Tom Forsythe, and the Quality Communities Program. Again, limited finances and resources crippled us, but TVA’s program was free. Phil Scharre and Tom Forsythe spent many hours with us and we are indebted. I want to take this chance to thank TVA. We could never have done this without them.
Tom and I worked long hours trying to develop a core committee to establish a program that would fit our specific community needs. We decided very early on that a healthy cross section of the community would be invited to that first table. We invited what I call the "old sore tails" in the community––the ones that write the letters to the editor on a regular basis, filled with half-truths. They are never happy about anything, always complaining, and, even though the community generally knows that they are full of hot air, just the fact that they’re doing what they are doing sometimes can ruin a project. The theory was that if they were invited and participated in that first program, they would expend some of that negative energy in supporting our program, and it worked. One of our most avid supporters happened to be a farmer, a fine fellow, who has gotten to be one of my really good friends. This program really did make a difference for him.
The opening session was led by Phil Scharre and Tom and lasted about three or four hours. The program they put together included team-building exercises, which were extremely important to our program, because we had such a diverse group of people, with such differing opinions that we had to have that team building in order to make this entire program work.
We developed a vision statement. Keep in mind that we had everything from the farmer to a nun, to an African-American female minister, to the Mayor, to the Judge, and to people who had trucking companies. It was really a cross section and they all had different ideas. Finally, after long hours, our vision statement reads as follows: "Franklin-Simpson County is a friendly community in which our neighbors may differ but are not divided. Our families cherish the value of our heritage while progressing toward a quality future. We promote stewardship and perpetuation of our God-given resources and proudly possess the title of "the Garden Spot of the World." Garden Spot of the World is a Simpson County joke.
Numerous planning meetings followed the opening meeting. We had excellent attendance, and the secret to having good attendance is to feed them. We fed them really often because we usually had 5:00 or 6:00 meetings and a great many people will come straight from work. If they know they can grab a bite and be gone in an hour or two, they are much more willing to participate. I have a story about Tom Forsythe that gives an idea of the kind of commitment this TVA official had to us. Tom lived about 100 miles from where we were. One night he asked for permission to bring a dish. He has an award-winning recipe for Crappie Gumbo. So one night we fixed a little rice and had Crappie Gumbo. That did a lot to endear him to the people of our community and I still get requests for that recipe.
We wanted input from as many people in our community as possible so we enlisted the help of civic groups and extension service members for responses to a questionnaire we developed. At that point, we decided we were going to have public forums. We chose four sites that we thought would attract the most people. We were very sensitive about what particular parts of our community would draw the most people; for instance, we held one forum at what was once an African-American school located close to a heavily-populated African-American section of our community. We felt, by having it there, those citizens would feel more comfortable and we would get better attendance. We also had one meeting at the art gallery and it drew a certain group of people in our community that felt very comfortable there. We had two different meetings within the school system and one at what we call the Ag. Building was basically for the farmers. We had good participation there.
We chose 16 people who received facilitative training from Phil Scharre and distributed posters. One of the smart things we did was to include the editor of the paper as part of our regional group. He gave us wonderful support and publicized our meetings, which was absolutely crucial to the success of our process. We also made it a point to include the high school students in our community and made sure they were aware that they would be welcome at the public forums. Simpson County has about 16,500 people. We had 125 people attend the public meetings and about 300 responses from the civic clubs and extension service.
Tom Forsythe and his wife took all the flip chart pages, spread them all through their house, used two computers, and compiled all the information. That was wonderful, and one of those things that we have to thank Tom for. As we put all that information together, we published it. Our newspaper did our vision statement and top issues for us. We put together a booklet that we distributed, but we isolated those six top issues and formed committees that continue working on them.
I’ll share some of the results. Our downtown restoration project was strengthened by the community’s interest in maintaining our historic downtown. The industrial board changed from a volunteer organization to a city- and county-funded board with broad representation. The community park system is being expanded, and a full-time director has been hired. The most exciting thing is that a new community center should open in 1998, developed by a partnership of the school system, the city, and the county. This is unprecedented in the Commonwealth. We are also examining regionalization of government services. In future meetings, probably in January or February, we are going to have experts speak to our community about the pros and cons of a "metro-government." Those are some results that our community identified as being important to them.
To sum up the skills and attributes that were necessary to pull together our very successful visioning process, first we had to recognize the need. That’s probably most important for most community visioning processes. You have to be really honest, because you are just spinning your wheels if you are not being honest with yourselves and the communities that go through this process. You have to be very sensitive to all the issues that are involved. Tenacity is important and you have to be able to hang in there because sometimes it gets pretty discouraging. You have to have tolerance, be a good listener, and have a good sense of humor. Thank you very much.
Dr. Miller:
It’s very apparent that Simpson County has a wonderful comedienne. Thank you for sharing that. Our last panelist is one of the vital staff members of the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center. Billie Sebastian also heads our scanning operation.
Ms. Sebastian:
In concert with the other panelists, I am also going to be speaking about a visioning and strategic planning effort, but ours is the one generated at the state level. We approached our visioning effort by asking four basic questions. The first question was "Where are we going?" Here’s where we examined the trends that were identified by over 100 experts based on their observations and experiences and we published those in our first two biennial trends reports, The Context of Change and Exploring the Frontier of the Future.
The second question is "Where do we want to be?" Answers to these questions were based on input from Kentucky citizens. We held over 15 public forums, one in each Area Development District, in the Fall of 1994 and asked all the attendees at the meetings where they wanted Kentucky to be in 20 years. Then we created a draft Vision Statement that was mailed to almost 3,000 Kentuckians, and asked for their input. Finally, we held a conference in the Fall of 1995 in Lexington and those participants helped fine-tune our Vision Statement.
Our third question then was "How do we get there?" Many state agencies have written strategic plans, but there wasn’t any unifying plan at the state level for government as a whole. So, based upon all of their individual strategic plans, we crafted goals and indicators of progress or benchmarks to include what we had learned from the citizen input and from the other state agencies about what they wanted for Kentucky in the future.
Our fourth question is "How do we monitor progress?" These indicators of progress or benchmarks are data driven in that we have gotten as much information as we could find on what we hope would indicate progress toward any individual goal. Then we will solicit a "report card" from Kentuckians to see how they think the Commonwealth is doing.
So our first question was "Where are we going?" Remember this is just the first step in a four-step visioning process and that examines trends in five basic areas. The first area is communities, where demographic shifts are currently underway. The second area is education, where increasing importance is placed on educational attainment. The third is the economy, and we note the impact of globalization and technology on Kentucky’s welfare and the workforce. The fourth area is the environment, where we are making progress but are still experiencing some problems. And the fifth area is government, noting that voter participation is considerably lower in Kentucky than in the United States as a whole, but we do have higher social capital, a stronger sense of trust, and higher rates of volunteerism.
We are going to examine these a little more closely. Again, these are just some sample trends organized around the five thematic areas showing where we are going. First we’ll look at communities. Kentucky’s population is aging and the state’s age 65 and over population is expected to increase by an additional 55 percent from 1995 to 2020, and many people are returning home to Kentucky. So we’ve had a net gain of 82,000 migrants from 1990 to 1995.
Education needs are changing as well, as technology plays a larger and larger role in industry and the workforce must adapt to that. It’s increasingly important for Kentucky’s labor force to continue training to keep up. Of the projected job openings between 1994 and 2005, only 1 percent of those that require no special training will have very high or high to medium wages, while 91 percent will have very low or low to medium wages. Conversely, of the projected job openings that require a bachelor’s degree or more, 80 percent will have very high or high to medium wages compared to only 1 percent that will have very low or low to medium wages. Kentucky’s educational status is rising and literacy levels here in Kentucky are above the national U.S. average. Additionally, the number of Kentuckians with a bachelor’s degree continues to rise and the same is true of those with high school diplomas.
Globalization is a key trend for Kentucky’s economy as Kentucky firms are now competing with firms worldwide rather than just next door or in the next state. Kentucky’s exports have exceeded the U.S. average and foreign firms now employ over 70,000 Kentuckians. Information technology is a key to Kentucky’s economy. In a recent survey we learned that almost 70 percent of Kentucky’s population either owns or has access to a personal computer at work, school, or elsewhere, and this figure compares favorably to the United States in that it’s about the same as the U.S. average.
Environmentally, Kentucky has made progress, yet still experiences some problems. Air quality is improved with reduced concentrations of air pollutants. And even though we are generating more solid waste than ever, more people are disposing of it properly, with an estimated 80 percent of Kentucky households participating in garbage collection. Also, the percent of impaired water waste in Kentucky continues to decline, but public water systems are not universal, and one in five households still do not have access to public drinking water systems. Additionally, over half the public water systems that we do have had one or more violations in 1995.
Voter participation in national, state, and local elections is still relatively low and consistently lower in Kentucky than in the United States as a whole, but social capital is high in the Commonwealth and Kentuckians express high levels of trust and commitment to volunteer activities. An example of a positive counterbalance that is underway would be the motor-voter law to increase the number of registered voters.
Now that we know where we are, our second step is to decide where we want to be. So from the public forums, the mass mailings, and the 1995 conference, the citizen input helped to create the Vision Statement for Kentucky’s future. "We envision a future for the Commonwealth of Kentucky that unites us in common purpose and builds on the strength of our heritage and our resources. We see vibrant nurturing communities, lifelong quality education opportunities, a sustainable prosperous economy, a clean, beautiful environment, and honest participatory government at all levels." The Vision Statement encompasses all five thematic areas that we mentioned earlier. The second step in the process is to ask, "How do we get there?" From the key phrases in the Vision Statement, we developed 26 long-term goals, organized around the five themes: communities, education, economy, the environment, and government. Our Visioning Kentucky’s Future document outlined all the goals.
The community goals specifically concerned families, housing, health care, social capital, and diversity. Our education goals included lifelong learning; an internationally competitive education for our students; the health and well-being of our children; partnerships between parents, teachers, and communities; safe, stable, learning environments for children; and, of course, the arts and humanities. The economy goals focus on poverty, globalization, and technology as key trends. Infrastructure and entrepreneurism were included here. The environmental goals covered concerns about our natural resources: recycling and pollution, for example. Our government goals included accountability in government at all levels, the justice system, and civic participation.
How do we monitor progress? This was our fourth step in the process. Similar to Oregon Benchmarks or Minnesota Milestones, we also used indicators of progress toward the individual goals. These indicators must be measurable and they should be comparable. Ideally we would like to have both historical data and comparative data for the United States and other states. But the data do not always have to be readily available because in many cases no data has yet been collected on an indicator that we’ve determined to be an important measure of progress toward our goals. So, in some cases, we used a survey instrument to begin collecting data.
Here’s an example. Goal One is: "Kentucky’s communities will be safe and caring places and enable all citizens to lead productive, fulfilling lives." This demonstrates how subjective the goals can be and how difficult the process might be to determine which indicators would be good ones to measure progress toward a goal. For instance, how do you determine communities that are "caring places" and what would be a "fulfilling" life? But, the indicators that we chose to use were safe communities, crime, neighborliness, and access for the handicapped.
We surveyed citizens in 1996 through the University of Kentucky’s Survey Research Center about safe communities and found that 93 percent of those surveyed said they either always or usually felt safe in their communities. Here, of course, we have no historical or comparative data, but with this one year’s data we have established a baseline that we can build on. For the crime index, we did have both historical and comparative data, so we can determine that the crime rate in Kentucky has been consistently lower than in the United States for the past several years. And, like the question about safe communities, we surveyed citizens through the UK Survey Research Center about neighborliness. We asked Kentuckians how many people they thought they could rely on in a time of need, and only 7 percent said none, 74 percent said 5 or more, and an enviable 8 percent said they could rely upon 50 or more people if they needed to.
A survey to determine how citizens think Kentucky is doing is going to be mailed out to over 6,000 people and ask them if they think we are making progress, losing ground, or standing still on each goal. The report with measurements is due to be published in January 1998. This, however, is a work in progress, and we expect to update this information with new data every two years.
In summary, the process for planning strategically for Kentucky’s future included four steps and four key questions: first, identifying trends to see where we are going; second, determining a vision or where we want to be; third, setting the goals to determine how we get there; and, fourth, identifying indicators of progress toward the goals. Thank you.
Dr. Miller:
Thank you very much. Because we started late, we are unfortunately unable to entertain any questions right now, but we do hope later you can meet with our panelists and talk to them about their projects. As Nancy said, one of the most important things to do is feed people. That’s next on the agenda. Thank you, panelists.
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