here thank you claire and thanks to everyone for being here it's great to see so many feet in the room and part of this process so of course that i'm back i'm really thrilled to be here i live down in battle not too far and it's really fun to be working in richmond and not part way across the country or over to me it's great to be working with dave again as well dave and i worked for many years together at the orton family foundation and have a lot of experience there in community engagement creative engagement place making community planning so are both now out on our own work on a variety of consulting projects we partner together on an l l c called community workshop and are really excited about the chance to come into a community and help you guys with some of the experience that we've found in other communities i've been so impressed actually to hear from claire about the start of your process already how many people have been excited to be part of the town plan committee what a diverse group of people you have already some of the conversations you've had starting to figure out who the different stakeholders and networks are in your community and how you can work with them better i think that's absolutely the best foundation for the community planning process and kudos to you all for starting the process there for being ready to have those conversations and being a part of this tonight so dave and i are going do you a few things with you tonight we want to do some introductions to start off because we don't know all of you but we'll probably be working with you a lot over the course of the next year and we'd love to hear a little bit about why you're involved in this process w richmond what you love about it which is going to mirror to some extent the kinds of conversations you'll probably be having with your fellow community members over the next few months as well will talk to you a little bit about the importance of visioning engagement quick show of hands how many have ever been part of a town planning process before the few how many have ever been part of any kind of visioning process whether at a town or an organization school create a lot of people there so your old hats that we won't have to do on it but we'll run over that a little bit and then we're going to hit you with a lot of ideas for community engagement that have worked in communities around the country around the world some of them might resonate and some of them won't so part of your job tonight is really thinking about which ones are going to be right for richmond which ones not so much which ones you want to talk about further we'll talk a little bit about think you the planning process overall what this is going to look like over the next year or so what kinds of events are sort of marked in place by the calendar and where we have some flexibility and we really want to put you to work tonight and not just talk at you all night so we will break out into some working groups and try to really make progress on some of the questions that are going to be coming out next we'll come back together before we depart the only other thing i really want to say before we get started is feel free to interrupt any time we really want this to be a conversation so you all have a lot of wisdom about visiting process as we just saw you are the ones who know your town best to kick off we actually do want to find out a little bit more about what you love about your town this is one of those examples we're going to be throwing out you will try to model a couple of them tonight but hopefully all of you on the way and picked up either a red or blue or green card and hopefully you wrote something on it so if you didn't take a couple minutes and scramble and write something on that if you didn't even pick one up there's one over there and we're going to put you on the spot you go around and hear a little bit about what richmond i mean well go ahead and start with anybody who is ready and if you do need more time you can catch up i'd like to just go around the room and how do you introduce yourself probably most of you know each other but dave and i don't know yet that we'd love to hear your name and he answer your for decades and so i got a lot of people that never it's part of their fault that i understand it but i want to hold their voice that they don't normally come out but they so many amazing assets and wonderful things about richmond i love the idea of taking what's great and making it better through this process you've identified great techniques and things that you want to do making sure to reach everyone great anecdote about delivering propane one of the best ways to perhaps reach the people who are never going to show up at some of the meetings so keep in mind everything you just heard as we go through the evening tonight and i'll tell you what i didn't tell you before too which is that there's another step with these cards so part of what we wanted to do is really get you off on the right material is outreach things that you can use to start the conversation with people in richmond so claire and i talked earlier this week and we said anyone tonight who's willing later we will take your picture holding up your side of what you said you love or wish for richmond we can throw together really quick slideshow turn it into a video and you can have it on line and say here's what our process it's asking these questions what do we love what do we want what do we want to change or what do we imagine so if you're not fine with that you certainly don't have to get your picture taken you can also just leave your card and we can photograph that but these are the kind of conversations that we hope are going to be going on everywhere in town over the next few months and we really want to capture what you've all said to kick it off tonight so wit something like that so those first slide is meet the keypads hello keypads now say goodbye to the keypads this is our first lesson and communication and using fancy technology of course everything works on your desk at home and then you come for everybody and when they stop working there's a bunch of questions in here that are designed for keypad responses we're going to do it a different way your lesson is be flexible work your way through the process and i always have a backup plan so there's a little bit of you know training here and community to get the first and all these questions are great keep a questions but they're also really good questions to ask people who are trying to get to know and bring into a process like this how long have you lived in richmond i'm going to do a show of hands just who's been here for less than five years all right and everyone else who's been here for more than fifteen years wow all right and then everybody you didn't raise your hand you're in the five to ten i think in the long lesson lesson three is take take everything a look at a little humor to everything we're doing a very serious thing but it's important to remember to have fun a little bit of fun this is visible to everybody i'm going to skip this question we were curious about where in town everybody lives but it looks a little too dar who here has kids going to school or did have kids going to school going to great how about let's see who loves it here you're all supposed to raise your hand by the i put this one then it's just so you know that we're not afraid to dive into the really tough questions ok so i am not going to make you raise your hands here with this would be a secret ballot answer and i put this  because the next slide has potentially a big you know issue by the yankees do down there at the bottom so i'm going to talk a little bit about vision decided you wanted to start with visioning so it may be a lot of you know the answer ready but for one it sets really good goals like if you understand what's important and you want to make those things better that's a solid start for setting goals focuses on the positives like you said joy i wasn't taking the good things making them better that's that's what visioning is a lot about and recognizing what's missing too and wanting to bring it in so visioning is really helpful for bringing people together finding common ground there's always outlying things and a vision about what's important to people but there's always a core that everybody really can focus on when th is you say we want to go there and then you figure out how to get there and so many communities instead are often faced with this decision of we're at an intersection show you right or left right now without really knowing what they're trying to get to  and that's our friend who is this you bear so i am not a facebook my answer to that other question would have been who cares anyway so you have you don't know where you're going might end up someplace else really critical envisioning is to set priorities so there's some things that are important to everyone but how much more important is that than the other thing so we can talk a little bit about that why engagement i think everyone in the room said something about why gauge mint is important bringing people and hearing and heard voices making sure everybody gets a chance to hear have their voices heard it's a really good way to exchange information make sure that  the public understands what's going on and understand what the issues are and for decision makers to understand the public's priorities and preferences and here ideas and have that dialogue often when big decisions come through a community there's a whole pile of misunderstandings so this is a chance to talk about what those are and understand them building consensus added this imprint the parent at least arrive at a decision in a better way so in a less divisive way visioning can help that strengthening relationships of visioning are the kind that we like to promote as people just going out and talking to each other and hearing each other stories and that's just an ancient way to get to know somebody else and build relationships and if if we run this project in a way that builds energy and optimism for taking action you often find that you'll drive people out of the woodwork who want to just charge take charge on some cool idea and run with it so there's often a coalition building that happens in these this kind of work so just so you know kind of what a vision statement may be like actually just reviewed a few this afternoon there are some that are thirteen pages long and some that are half a page long they're always looking to the future  they're generally positive they're comprehensive meaning like they're trying to include everything that you want to capture about the communities future and they're both broad meaning they're not going to go into the twenty page details on every single thing but they can be pretty specific about a particular dating a preference for that future so shared values visions are always focused on what's important to us as a community what's unique what are the good things and what's what are those things what are those things look like if we make them better in the future ok and all this the process we want to work with is he's articulating all that making sure it's clear and something everybody signs on for these are a few examples of visions bennington vermont you can see that i'm not going to read it but i just want to point out the fact that the comprehensive nature of it there's all these different  pieces are elements of the vision describing different facets of the community and capturing what's important to bennington can you see ok if you just just throw something at me here if i'm here  here's golden colorado project back and i were involved with just characterize all these different elements of the community and just a short descriptive statement about each of them know interject right here to just do a little example of how that vision how articulating what's important to can help you make a decision ok and this is where communities get challenged all the time to instead of a community we're going to buy a car together ok and my first question to you is just looking at this now we're currently we want to by anybody have an answer the red one great question is anybody a great question great question ok so it's there's not enough you know a little information i have i'm hearing somebody was either i thought you were that shallow ok here's some information are we ready to make a decision yet right so it's probably obvious so you can get information and pilot into a decision but if you don't organize it well if you don't understand what's important to you it still can be pretty tricky so it's complicated and sometimes people try to sway your opinion right so you make the red car seem more fun and they tell you you would be quite foolish to choose the white car and that happens all the time so this is just a simple tool there's all kinds of examples about how to use values that are in a vision to make a decision but this is one of them so if we organize our choices and we talk about what we care about for this car i already heard some of the answers but can anybody say what's important to you about a car what makes you what influences your decision about buying a car safety there's one more reliability these are all good ones but this is so ok and i can actually add that to this also kohler somebody just has to say the one that i'm about to tell the contrary i think an operation out there that gives us comfort ratings but typically it's leg room bedroom the seats but they're like ok so this is called the impact evaluation so so i'm hoping here are quickly translating  into a community decision moment tray these are the things that are important to us this is what's described in a vision for a car and these are the choices we're trying to where we're trying to evaluate trey so it's the number isn't here can anybody tell me which of these choices is just looking not good the first ones it's very more expensive and less comfortable and less safe so right away if we evaluate our option here we can say that one is probably no good now you have three choices left is there one that thing if you're using this technique is that sometimes you get down to a couple choices and those choices actually perform just as well and certain in certain areas so in this case our choices that are left safety  performs the same right so we can we connect this is just a process of kind of narrowing it down if you imagine like a community conversation about a big issue you can do like the places that you can find points of agreement on ok so we're narrowing it down or is going to black out all that other distracting stuff and say oh here's our choice we've got an eleven thousand or ten thousand dollar car and why the more expensive one is more comfortable so in this particular situation our choice is really breaks down to this would we pay more for a slightly more comfortable car  have been encouraging you to translate this into the vision and decision making framework but we've basically got our values and this is typically what tactic you laid it in a vision we've got measures in this is usually the details that are in that vision as well in different ways and we've got options and then we've got this whole how does that measure up now like this doesn't actually make a decision for you but what it really does is help you have a better conversation about your choices because that happened to him so this is what we think is important about educating kids this is how this kid measured up and it's it's so it's not a it's not like a crazy framework that came to us from a foreign it's something we use all the time it's just not often used in a community decision so it you that's right after you after the end of the semester you can add up all the scores and decide which kid you want so been encouraging you to think about this but say you know these are kind of classics which is richer and care about i just feel these kind of find that some of you said these things already and the example i just gave you is well needs to change or what can we make better you can also use it to strategize so in similar to that other system you can say which which of our actions will have the biggest impact on values like what will take us for this most quickly and you can also this is similar to assess but you know five years from now you can use the same approach to say here are the things that we've done and have the things we've done and had the activision statements here's one from tallahassee florida is quite clear about the different aspects of their community that are put to them and and mostly what they do is describe how they have a vision that where else what their preferences like the direction they want that pressure that component to go it can be very helpful ok so everybody is saying our area what are we doing  we're right here right now laying the groundwork does a bit of a framework for how we propose to organize this project is the phases laying the groundwork is really just all of us getting together and it's organizing to deliver this project so a lot of that's been happening already and bringing and you guys have met are bringing the building of vision is what will be doing through the summer taking a dive into the issues in the fall and crafting the plan through next winter into the spring just focus on these two parts of the face so communicating the processes and it's important i'm not going to go through all of these process for the process for the committee that you're putting together and as you said you've already started that you answered some questions about what you think is important about the way you carry out this process how it should be how you should all be committee members driving planning so there were about seven key goals that really emerged from the list that we saw and i will go through these because we want you to actually think pretty carefully about these and whether you feel comfortable with them as goals for the planning  process the importance of this is really making sure you all are on the same page and you can support the same kind of process even though you're coming from very different places in the community you have very different personal goals for what you want to see happen in richmond but the process needs to have some commonality so we heard people want to see a high quality plan drafted and that means a few things it means it has good ideas that it actually incorporates the feedback you're hearing so engagement process doesn't do much good if you get all that feedback and then it doesn't make it into the plan that's the kind of thing we're talking about number two the president support and approve the plan there were a lot of comments on this point people saying well it's going to be successful if the plan is actually passed or it's successful if there's not a last minute effort to defeat it so that's one of the things we've heard from multiple people started with some it's because number three that the plan represents compromise and diverse interests same kind of  this one came out enough times we wanted to really call it out very specifically so we hear that there are a lot of different opinions there's been some debate and discussions in richmond i think people seem to recognize that whatever happens in the plan is going to have to balance those different interests and someone's number for building buzz and awareness around the planet there were a few winters that were really specific which i love people saying you know this process is going to be successful if people walking into my shop know about it and are talking about it or if people are talking about the plan and a vision for richmond in every day dinner table conversation so excitement number five broad diverse participation again recognizing as you already have starting that community network analysis that there are lots of different groups of people in this community some are formal some are informal groups lot of different demographic so are they really all involved do they have a voice we heard that from  of you going around the room as well and there were some other specific statements about this specifically noting that this process will be successful if we proactively go after them to solicit their opinion not just wait for them to show up at a meeting hope that they fill out a survey but really go out into the community and make sure that all of these different groups are invited to participate number six some people were talking a little bit more qualitatively about the end result so this process will be successful if richmond is a vibrant community if it's growing on the other end and number seven was an interesting one if planning conversations or improves the planning of course does not and when the templa approved but if people are more likely to participate if they understand what planning is in the issues around planning if they understand how they can participate if conversations are more civil going forward than this process will be successful we're not going to spend a ton of time going through all of these tonight again what we had hoped to do was let you all vote with keypads and get a sense of which schools are most supported which was maybe or falling to the bottom of the list and then generally can you all except in move forward with this set of goals so here's our first lesson in one of the values that say we heard get about values in the minute we heard that a lot of people want to make sure this process is respectful includes listening and particularly listening to people with diverse opinions so the lovely thing about keypads is that we could have done this voting anonymously we're not going to able to do that tonight so here's your first chance to be willing to put your hand up and say yes or no to something and to listen and accept respectfully if people disagree with about not sure this is a good one so up in that gray box there is the set of goals that i just laid move forward seeing consensus in the room and anyone completely opposed not comfortable moving forward ok so great that it looks like everybody was in number one or two i think as a set of goals it sounds like this will work for you for the  is about values that should underlie this process how do we all need to be people leading this process in the community if it's going to meet those goals that we just talked about if we're going to produce a quality plan if we're going to engage people if we're going to help make richmond a vibrant livable exciting place so these are roughly the categories of values that came up most often and then we heard and again in these packets you can see the whole list of what everybody is so transparent are we sharing information meetings are not happening in secret people can find out what's going on in the process and understand how decisions are being made are being inclusive again not just welcoming people if they choose to show up but specifically going out and making sure we are including and trying to hear from everybody in the community objective came up a lot of our decisions and choices being made based on facts in the best available information rather than opinions and personal a all probably doesn't need a whole lot more explanation but are we know there's going to be disagreement is it happening in a way that we can still walk out as neighbors and accept each other's community members and know that people are going to have different  positive was important so again even though there may be disagreements can we all be positive and focus on richmond's assets and what we want for the future instead of focusing on what we don't want forward thinking again focusing on conversations about where we want to go instead of we turn right at left one of these little details and inform goes back to objective a little bit as well we want to make sure this process has the best available information that we are offering up whatever people really need in order to be able to make good decisions so we'll do the same kind of thing so you can advance how many in the room fully support these values as a way that we should be carrying  ok great how many can work with them how many have reservations that are willing to go forward and anyone who can't ok my goodness you're an agreeable bunch all right great next  this was a fun one so we have to think a little bit about the identity of the process which is maybe kind of a funny question to some of you we don't often think about processes as having identities of their own but of course they do any material you put out to the community is going to have a look and feel and people will get some message from that communications material same way even if you don't think you are creating an identity for your process you are by default there is a message going out and if you happen to be graphic designers or communications people you know this if you don't think about way any graphic design or communications person would tell you you should and you need to think about it so we want to find out where you think this process should be not necessarily recommend itself but when you're starting the right messaging right invitations an outreach materials come up with a logo where do you want to fall on the spectrum so we're going to show you your answers here and then talk about what they mean so a so i think a couple of things to point out really quickly during vs print for example you have at least one person maybe two who responded and said we need to be really daring and a couple other people who said we'd be really prudent all right so you've got the whole range gentle and aggressive same thing almost the whole spectrum this is the one home made and manufactured that really stood out with some consensus among the group you want to be a homemade kind of town so that's what i think to focus on as you're really doing th materials and say ok that's something we can push traditional and modern cross the border light and serious a little bit of a cluster in the middle so you don't want to go too far to either right and on that one maybe common caffeinated again a big  there are couple things we took from this i'm not going to go any further but again i would love some of the ones where you do feel there are some agreement so think about the whole me and otherwise just take them as a lesson again of the diversity that you have in this room and in the community  designing a lot of different strategies a lot of different messages talking to a lot of different groups and instead of trying to make everything fit in one box or find the middle ground think about tailoring it to your audiences so if you're going out to a group that would fall on the modern end and would really appreciate that maybe that top of your messaging focuses are what you try to do with them if you're going to a different kind of group that's really going to appreciate a calm setting or a serious setting do it that way and don't t category we have to offer ideas about name so it's a lot easier for process does have a name some way to refer to it you can get people talking about that building that buzz than they have something the laptop into you can put it on the poster you can put on the logo and that's how you really get people building awareness of what's going on and any time they see that they'll say oh yeah that's the process i know it's happening or if you start taking action on something and put up a little sidebar notice you can attach the name and people will understand that something's actually coming out of this process so there are a lot of different ideas on the we can all read twenty thirty in brackets because i think we've got the whole spectrum twenty twenty twenty twenty five twenty thirty twenty thirty five twenty fifty we would suggest looking somewhere in the middle horizon if you do you make a name that has a number so maybe fifteen years out is a good version of lots of versions of kind of do a quick show of hands i don't know if we'll be able to make a decision tonight but you may come back to this committee how many people in the room love some version of richmond twenty thirty year whatever number you happen to pick anybody think that's a favorite  voter they're not all right we took the ones that had the most votes or that seemed to be the most fitting for me and some of them you know the long one this really just won't work as a name for you but it's kind of a mouthful hard to put on posters again we're not making a firm decision tonight we're going to kind of gauge interest in the group come back to those of the committee talk about it see which one is rising at the top we're just going to get a quick sense of whether anything is really standing out to go play so any version of enrichment however you want to capitalize it's got one crack about richmond tomorrow hey we got a few hands on that one bout five or six richmond together decided to sketch out what a few logos could possibly look like just to show your ideas again these are not final you're not committing to anything tonight definitely not committing to names which he just threw out here as examples but we wanted to get a quick sense as to whether any of these design directions are standing out to you a little bit more and here's a connection back to that identity question that we asked you so if richmond was way over on the modern side of that for example we would say choice number one probably a good  bet number three is not looking so modern you guys are a little bit more in the middle for you need to worry about that too much just go with what you think will work best which one of these do you think really fits the community or would appeal to people the most so quick so kind of what what message it's going to send to the community when they hear about it for the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time how you're going to start customizing that to people in various neighborhoods of engagement it's that are now we're going to get into the fun stuff and before just throw this up really quickly got to remind you what we're focusing on tonight so it's important to remember engagement doesn't and just in one or two phases you're going to engage in people the whole way through and even after the plan is passed likewise action doesn't need to only happen victor idaho another very small town a few years ago and they decided actually before they wanted to do any visioning engagement they had to do some action people just did not trust that anything was ever going to happen out of the community process so they would not even participate in the conversation until they saw something on the ground and they did a couple of projects they made a new bike park for kids and they cleaned up a little gateway area and planted some flowers that part done they are finally ready to sit down to talk so just think about that as we're going through you can sprinkle in all these different parts of the process but for the most part tonight we're going to be focusing on getting you to think about laying the groundwork so what do we need to do to set the stage for a really solid process and get us to those goals that you just identified and building a vision how are we actually going to get to some of the characteristics that dave identified so i think back to building a car or buying a car the community version of that what are those values for richmond is that sense of character is it strong local economy or is it something else how in the world are we going to go about the fact we're going to throw a couple of general principles to keep in mind as you're hearing lots of options for gates been visiting strategies one is the concept of heartbeat and gauge and so this is not going to be a static process in terms of pace or the level of activity over the next year good visioning engagement processes often follow a pattern that looks kind of like this you build up a little bit and have a few little bursts of activity and then you build up to something big and exciting that maybe a community event may be some kind of celebration for something like that get over that everybody needs to rest take a little break down to think even doesn't stop there might be still some other little burst of activity building up to something else totally different way to think about an octopus engagement so again we're not talking about a one size fits all here process here you've identified so many different groups in the community different things will resonate with all of them they're all going to have different capacities for engagement some of them are going to want to be at every single meeting weighing in others will not show up no matter what you do they're going to have different meetings as and where they are so one way to think about a process is a little bit like an octopus it's going to have a centralized command center that might be a larger message it might be a core shape to the process and then there's going to be all these different little tentacles reaching out into the community in different ways and they might do very very different things and look very differently so the way you reach high school students could be completely different than the way you reach senior citizens and completely different in the way you reach the snowmobile club and the young fan base and don't feel like you have to make some of the same there should be some commonality to all of that but use but you've got use the people you have and try to work with them in the ways that will work for them and last small teams versus big bucks so you're engaged in strategies that can kind of be depend divided into two camps here and dave and i'll actually split up this part some of them are are little bit like small change they're quick they're easy they're not too expensive it doesn't cost a whole lot for people to participate these are the kinds of things that people might be able to do at five o'clock when they're picking their kids off at daycare and really only have five minutes before they need to go home or they're standing in line at the grocery store or you catch them while they're walking up the street these are still  really valuable engagement strategies they're going to reach people they'll let you know about the process you can find out critical information from them but you're not diving really deep into what they care about you're not getting into huge discussions about the the engagement strategies are the ones where you do really get into those serious conversations and these are the ones where you can really tackle the issues you can get people with different opinions talking to each other understanding where they diverge where they come together really making some serious progress it's important to have both in your process so the small changes the way you build excitement and energy is the way you signal that this is a different kind of process this is not going to be all of us sitting around at the town hall waiting for people to show up and give their opinion we're going to be open and engaging it's fun it's light it can get people thinking a little bit differently it's just as important to have the big bucks and have to have the meet as well you have to give people opportunities to really dive into the issues have the serious conversations so we'll give you a lot of options for both before we do just a few top tips to keep in mind when you are choosing strategies and starting to think about which ones are going to work here in richmond and which ones aren't so number one know your audience you've started that conversation will help you get even further with one of the groups tonight is going to dive a little bit further into the network analysis understanding who people are and what the best ways to reach them are number two go to people so again don't expect them to show up for this is not a field of dreams kind of model and you build it hosted at the town hall people won't come leave some of them or come hard as you try there are always people who just are too busy won't do it don't want to and so if you really care about getting their opinions you have to go to them where they are going about their homes whether it's over coffee at the local diner or whether it's standing on the sidelines of their kid's softball game to get out where they are and go to their number three use connectors so some of those environments might be pretty hard for you to walk into as a member of the town playing committee but if you can find a person in that group who's willing to be an entry point go through that that's a much better way to do it so who are the people who know everyone who  strategies we're going to show you tonight won't fly here we can tell you that right now you are the ones who have the knowledge to be able to filter those out and take this one yet the seminal work this is going to engage our citizens in these are and when you do choose them and you start to make them your own you need to again try to think about what's going to resonate here on the ground in richmond everything from colors to where you hang posters to what kinds of messaging go out can you refer to local landmarks local to rio places people live that's how you really make it your own mix it up again think octopus year into the same thing for everybody don't do the same thing the entire twelve months keep it changing keep people interested and give them different ways to t technology sometimes so as we actually demonstrated for you tonight technology is not always a fit even when it isn't always work so keep that in mind when you're dealing especially with different demographics you have the digital natives today the younger generation to live on live and live on phones and technology can be a great way to reach them obviously there are others in the community who are not going to respond to well about there are some formats public meetings where technology might be great a really good way to help change up the kind of feedback you can get in other settings where it doesn't make sense take a break so you are just starting about a year long process now and you're going to need some breaks don't try to keep up the steam paced the entire time but again  those first use times of energy and excitement for what they are and then give it a rest and let your community members have a little rest share often transparency was probably the top value that emerged in all the surveys we saw and the best way to be really transparent is to just keep a flow of information coming out to the community tell them what you're doing in your meetings what you're deciding what's happening in the events that they're not a part of what you're hearing from different groups and of course w participating followthrough is important as well if you hear ideas in some of these engagement processes that are easy to do right away and you can make it happen that's huge and show people that this process is going to do something or if someone asks you to do something make sure you follow through building that kind of trust in the process is really critical to keeping people in gauged and if that lapses it's pretty hard to get back and last keep it real so again when you're thinking about what's going to work tonight ask yourself  personal questions around that too you're going to see a lot of ideas some of them take a lot of time to implement some of them not so much so you might cost a little bit more money some of them not so much so think about what your capacity is as a group what's going to excite you and keep you motivated involved over the next twelve months and which ones can help fit with with your capacity in your interests so here we go diving into the fun stuff we're going to run through these pretty quickly some of them you may have seen before some of them you may have never heard of we can go back or ask questions again stop if you want to know a little bit more about what happened that will give you lots of different ideas for how you could start getting that feedback from the community about what people value what people want  how many of you have seen a wall like this before before it died there are scattering of them in vermont now this originated down south this is called before i die it's basically a chalkboard pete you can put it up on an abandoned building you can just create a mobile one kind of standing on a street corner and people come along and right by ever they want so obviously that would not be the right question but if you wanted to do something like this it could be before next year i want richmond to some of the same kinds of questions we asked you  done in this way here's a similar one created by the same desire who created that called i wish this was these are little stickers they don't harm buildings or for sods or anything like that so you can literally stick them all over your town and let people write in what they wish they had in a certain place here are a lot of other options for doing roughly the same thing so you can tailor the questions to richmond you can tailor what the board is or where it is this is one we did in in battle just on a flip chart at a community festival so again this does not need to be expensive or fancy just a way of starting to get people to talk and it actually works in my town to one of those ideas are made to happen and it's something the community really loves right now this is a big fancy whiteboard version so you could get one fabricated and move it around all different events and let people weigh and have something you could use in the community for years and years you can do it with sticky notes you can do it with a big star all of these are just great ways to kind of spark that something's different something exciting is going on you walk into a room and see something like this it tends to draw people in and you get a lot of great quick feedback about what people would like to see you can do similar things using mobile phones so again here's an example of where you could use technology knowing that not everyone is going to choose to respond to something like this so this is a project dave's working on right now in the code you new hampshire they created these posters plastered them all over town you can customize  partner in our future so when you think about crafting that overall vision statement you are looking longer and you're going to want some of the engagement visioning activities to be getting at those longer term things but you can also do some of those quick questions and find out what people want to have happen quickly what could happen really fast it's all in how you craft the questions and the balance that you can together because that into your question could be somewhat  exciting happening in town something kind of fun and you could easily combine a small engagement opportunity with that you could stumble that texting number under the arm and when people sit there and invite them to text and what they love about richmond or you could cover the chalkboard paint and let people write on them what they want something like that this is what we did in my town again time back to the local assets things that you have so it turned out we had one hundred fifty old wooden theater style seats sitting in the basement of the town office that the town manager was just going to toss so we painted them all bright colored stuck them out all over town and people are amazed they found they actually wanted places to sit right there they never knew they needed a bench in that spot that was actually a good way to find out where people might want some real changes what might they want physically different community here's a piano that's done sometimes those are stuck out in towns again just getting people to liven up some public spaces use them think a little bit differently about what you have in mind what might be interesting this  here is an example of a part probably some of you visited or some other feel years last year you there was a little controversy around that but it can be a fun way again to create a gathering place where there isn't one that something's happening that kind of this specially effective when it's really temporary so maybe you only do it for a week and you pick one weekend that you really think a lot of people will be out on the streets and you want to capture them go by and set up shop there and try to do some visioning activities when they come by there are a lot of other varieties of pop up things that can be great for interacting with people stuck in the heart of the soul essex logo up at the top they just did a great process over the last few years i don't have a photo of what they did but one of the things they heard pretty quickly as they wanted that coffee shop they needed a gathering place and so the committee decided they were going to create it they couldn't really open a real one but as part of their process they had pop up coffee shops in an empty storefront three or four times invited people to come and get free coffee and talk about the future prospects at the same time so that was a great way to get people in the door who might not show up at a community meeting or something else anybody seeing these before little free libraries all over the place really really easy to install stick up all over town if you felt like it you can paint them bright colors so people would see it immediately and know what it is and instead in addition to the library books you could offer materials about the process for materials people to take back like a survey of the bottom is kind of a neat one this is from the imagine north adams process that happened a couple years ago in north adams massachusetts so they were really dealing with vacant storefronts downtown and thought they wanted their process to help address that so they turned one of those store hall said a different tone again reach some people who wouldn't necessarily come into the process the other way at the end of the process went away in festivals are really good when to think about it so one way you'll make your lives easier is if you go to people where they already are and events that are already happening instead of trying to create some kind of massive party think about fourth of july parade farmers markets where people are already gathering and how can you reach them as part of that process that's not to say you can't create your own to this down here is the example of an open streets kind of event how many of you saw times square with people hanging out on chairs these are happening all over the country as a way to just shift the conversation it's fun people want to come out who doesn't want to sit in the middle of times square in a lunch hour for a day and start asking questions about how we could use this space differently what do we want for it changing the perception that it has to be the way it is right now visible and interesting to people and as as like sometimes this text messages are so short but they're so rich with information really that you're hearing about what people really are thinking about for the community so you can actually compile that information and start crafting that vision and not just that but you actually get action ideas and even direction on policy sometimes so there's the kind of interesting output from that stuff what's really important in this is we're getting into those hundred dollar activities because they're a little more of an investment in time or or money or different kinds of resources human resources storytelling is an approach it's basically like it's basically like an interviewing process where you set up a questionnaire but everyone likes a in the room commits to interviewing five people in the community so suddenly you've got how many people are here somebody so we've got sixty voices added i'm guessing there's twenty so ok one hundred voices added to the conversation  and if and sometimes like a can agree this might form a subcommittee around that kind of idea where you can just go out storytelling activities or actually group activities like they can be part of a big forum where everybody gets together and and does these interviews in groups and that's more relationship building it's more interesting to hear from lots of different people at once not everybody's comfortable with that kind of like intimacy though right so there's different ways to do this it can be really rich and you can take a really deep dive into people's values and priorities about a community and you can i hope you can see why we're calling this more of like the big bucks kind of effort because it does it takes a commitment it takes everybody say yeah i'm going to do five or ten but you can like if you use that approach you can certainly get so much good rich information this is more of a audience building thing but it's a fun activity that you can sometimes find people who want to make a little video about town or a video that answers a particular kind of question but this is video is it could be like an essay like write an essay about your vision for the community yes like a high school class english class to do this kind of activity so we can tap into different organizations who might support something like this if there's an arts group or you know teacher at the local school that would want their kids to do this a bunch of projects i've worked on have actually found like a boys or girls club group or a high school class and they've just become like the video people and they go out and they interview everybody in town and they put together really need videos so there's so there's content that comes out of that but there's also this neat promotional value to it like it's sharing with the community and building those relationships that people are engaged  interested models this is more this is common in kind of physical planning discussions where you're building models of a community or asking kids to kind of craft a model i worked on a project where we had kids make design parks out of macaroni noodles and you wouldn't like their ideas were awesome it just took like a technical person to actually turn that stuff into it real building designs i don't know if this one will be a work here but informal gathering so this is similar to what like having community meetings but actually setting up a script for people to host their own little mini meetings at their home and inviting their friends or their neighbors to join them you can create like a little package of questions and just ask them as a group to answer the questions and then submit that back to the to this committee so another just simple way to distribute the activities around town and make sure you're you know hitting different neighborhoods  different social circles that are around town living room conversation sometimes that's because surveys everybody's probably familiar with surveys are classic and they're simple that deliver that put them on line print them out and make them available at the library or whatever and this is a good way to kind of validate information that you've received from some other process sure will be doing some of those public events back to mention like if there's a parade or some kind of event in town that you can piggyback on set up a table and really reach out to people who come to that event oh that's my project expect this one in particular was a big discussion it was a basically a community for when we set it up in the high school cafeteria gardner mean and invited everybody to come out and it was it was really really interesting just forming these small discussion groups around different issues and really diving in and pulling out new ideas and priorities that kind of thing that's that hurt people's going way up because the prep for this kind of thing is really intense it's like event planning it's thinking about how to facilitate the event it's training people to facilitate discussions and all kinds of lead into this and then it happens and everybody it's usually thrilling and meaningful and then afterwards to her because back down and everybody wants to take a month off because it's been such a big effort unline forums i think everyone has front porch forum it's always a good way to communicate not often a good way to host a discussion but a great way to get information out there there's other online forums that are better for discussions that say how would you re imagine the konya if you can read it says tell us on the back post your photo and take a photo of that year of your answer and post it on our facebook page so we got hundreds and hundreds of these back and they were drawings and poems and real meaning thoughtful answers all kinds of stuff and it was just open ended and really interesting to see what was on people's minds and the these were put in diners and bars and we gave them to people who were having backyard barbecues so they went like all over town and everybody just everyone knows about this project because of this simple things like that so ok questions maybe becca you want to jump up with me so we can both and we can put the i turn to they may have questions about all that  before you had to wait sorry before you ask questions i'll say that we're going to break out into groups to talk about engagement strategies and what might work here we're going to have another group talking about communication strategies and then another group talking about kind of the big issues that we need to start compiling more background information for that we know it is going to come up and needs to be better understood so the three groups  that are going to take a vote they're going to hash out some some ideas for us tonight but just on the whole community engagement thing or communications or why are you still talking dave any i'll take any finding ways to do some small actions right away is a really creative approach to say i think i'm just trying to think of him for example for a community we just heard much oh that's good that that was the answer so the only way to go that is just expectation management like really being transparent about how the process is going to roll and it's making it really clear right up front that it's not