Last week, the Town Plan Steering Committee and Planning Commission gathered at Town Center to take on a giant task: to take nearly 850 comments, surveys and ideas and turn them into a one unified community vision.
How does that work? It took many hours of reading, writing and editing; a lot of committed volunteers, and reams of post-it notes. Here's a glimpse of the process.
Messy? Sometimes. Rewarding? You bet. We can't wait to share it with you.
How does that work? It took many hours of reading, writing and editing; a lot of committed volunteers, and reams of post-it notes. Here's a glimpse of the process.
- We took all of the surveys, interview notes, photos of the chalkboard comments and more and organized them into packets. We distributed each packet to two volunteer readers.
- Readers went through every comment, taking notes on what people value about Richmond or want for the future, issues or concerns, and tangible ideas or suggestions.
- At a workshop on August 6, readers transferred all of their distinct ideas for "values" onto Post-it notes and put them up on the wall. Then we sorted and shuffled, talked and sorted and shuffled some more.
- At the end of the night, we had eleven clear themes, or core community values. The Community Workshop LLC, our Town Plan consultants, took those piles of notes and themes and reworded them into a draft vision statement.
Messy? Sometimes. Rewarding? You bet. We can't wait to share it with you.