Community Sustainability Vision A positive, compelling broadly-supported vision of the future has been clearly proven to be a key driver and tool for guiding change and healthy growth within a community. Examples from around the globe show the benefits of diverse sets of citizens coming together to envision and plan for the future; these examples also show how a citizen-driven process and vision has much more buy-in than a top-down government driven initiative which all to often appears to be done ‘to’ people versus with them.
On the North Shore, we believe we have a very encouraging set of conditions to support a citizen-driven community vision – supportive governments, some compelling challenges and opportunities, a host of diverse community groups and neighborhoods to draw on and a range of other institutions that are keen to see a collective picture of the future to help guide their actions. We also believe it is critical that a community vision is a North Shore wide vision that avoids the risks of disjointed and potentially conflicting, more local (e.g. municipal) visions. LNS has taken initial steps to scope out an effort to create such a shared, North Shore wide vision – along with the principles, goals and strategies that will guide actions towards its realization. This initiative intends to engage a broad diversity of interests on the North Shore to develop a positive vision for the future and a roadmap to get there. Local governments are key partners in this process - we will coordinate with them to define the key outputs of a process that would support their planning efforts. The timing for this project is very good as local municipalities will be revising their Official Community Plans within the next 1-2 years, and a number of major infrastructure and development decisions are looming that could be very positively influenced by a strong community vision.
|
