EDH 2025 Progress Report_Jan 09-Dec 10

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Community Involvement Pre -Plan Adoption 2004 -2005 EDH 2025 Visioning and Action Planning Community Visioning Explained Visioning is a process through which a community envisions the future that it wants, plans how to achieve it, and begins to implement it. A successful community visioning process requires broad community involvement. Through visioning, a community comes together to generate answers to the following questions: Where are we now? Where are we going? Where do we want to be? And finally, how do we get there? The community visioning process used for Downtown Hilo consisted of a total of four community workshops, a government workshop, a facilitator training workshop, and an alternative outreach plan which came to be known as the Road Show. Recognizing that only a portion of the community could attend the preliminary visioning workshops, the Road Show was designed to take the vision ideas generated at such workshops and showcase them to the wider community for their input. The Road Show also included a questionnaire that was distributed to nearly 10,000 local residents. What is Action Planning? Once a community has completed the visioning process, they must establish a detailed plan for how they intend to arrive at its vision. Action Planning is a process that challenges the community to generate ideas and projects, take ownership of them, and find ways to implement them. A sound Action Plan is well organized, written with a clear and helpful level of detail, and most importantly, is implementable. Although action planning is a process that typically occurs behind closed doors, reserved for a select few, this was not the case with EnVision Downtown Hilo 2025. Determined to sustain the plan as a community based effort, action planning for the EnVision Downtown Hilo 2025 project consisted of two intensive Action Plan Workshops, a Focus Area Action Plan Review Team Meeting, and two Comprehensive Action Plan Review Team Meetings that involved a variety of community members. These intense work sessions, held over a three month period, led to the development of a detailed action plan matrix for each of the six Focus Areas. This was a complicated process that involved scrutinizing every strategy, every action idea, every suggested lead or supporting partner and every existing resource. The community members who participated in this stage of visioning committed an enormous amount of time and every into finalizing the action plan. Envision Downtown Hilo 2025 Progress Report January 2009 -June 2010 Page 20