Vision to Action Forum FAQ

The Vision to Action Forum is a one-and-a-half-day community gathering, which brings together a broad cross-section of community members to assess their community's strengths and opportunities, and identify problem areas, to share their ideas and hopes for their community's future, and to shape and launch an action plan to achieve their specific goals.

A citizen Steering Committee, representing a cross-section of the community, works with an Advisor / Lead Facilitator from a non-profit organization, county or borough

government, university or an independent firm to plan the event. Advisors help provide the structure and the lead facilitation, while Steering Committee members decide how to

make the event most successful in their community, coordinating the logistics, publicity, and cultural aspects and finding local citizens to facilitate the small group discussions.

The Vision to Action Forum has three overarching goals:

Strengthening Community Vitality

The Forum process is designed to help strengthen the community, rallying renewed community spirit and energy. During the 1-1/2 day process, local citizens gather with old and new acquaintances to affirm the community's strengths, identify common concerns, and create action steps to meet these challenges.

Building Civic Engagement and Local Leadership

The Forum process brings new faces into the community discussion process. Drawing heavily on the collective wisdom of the participants, the Forum provides a means for citizens to work together, expands the community's leadership pool, and creates momentum and local spirit for positive change. In addition, the advisor offers facilitation training to 20 community members, who then act as small-group facilitators during the Forum event. This new pool of trained facilitators can be a valuable asset in follow-up efforts across the community.

Promoting Sustainable Development

Through participation in The Forum, residents have the opportunity to see their community from different perspectives and over a longer time frame. This expanded 10 Community Vision to Action Forums: An Organizers' Guide to Participatory Planning vision often leads to ideas for healthy new initiatives. In addition, the Forum strengthens the local economy as community members and outside investors and funders are more likely to support projects that have emerged from a participatory process in which the underlying values and goals of the community have been examined.

Although each Vision to Action Forum is as unique as the community it represents, all Forums have three outcomes:

Community Projects

During the 1-1/2 day event, participants begin with big-picture visioning and then narrow their ideas down to concrete, prioritized action steps. These action projects are only limited by the imagination of the community and, in other communities, have included such efforts as launching a community newspaper, building a town trail system, organizing an industrial park, launching a comprehensive planning effort, creating a support group for new small-business entrepreneurs, and many, many others. Oftentimes, a community opts to launch a larger-scale effort requiring significant planning time, while simultaneously launching smaller concrete projects, thus attracting the efforts of a range of community members.

Vision to Action Forum Report

The results of the small- and large-group sessions at the Vision to Action Forum event are all recorded and transcribed, and result in a Forum Report that is distributed to all participants as well as town committees and the library. Far from another report that will sit on the shelf, the Forum Report includes the many ideas and suggestions citizens offered at the event. Once towns have successfully completed the first round of action steps, they often go back to the report to "mine" it for additional ideas.

Strengthening a Sense of Common Purpose

Although this outcome may be the hardest to measure, it also may be the most important. The Vision to Action Forum draws on a broad range of viewpoints, examining cultural, economic, environmental and social issues, each in light of the other. Forums focus on thoughtful issue identification. Rather than polarizing a community around problems, it brings people together around solutions.a

Everyone! The Forum event is broadly inclusive. Forum planners work hard to make sure that the many different groups and corners of the community are represented, in order to make for the most vibrant, accurate discussion of the community's past, present, and future. Well-rounded participation also ensures that the action steps that come out of a Forum have broad citizen support and create sustainable solutions. Although the average size of a Forum is around 120 citizens, Forums have ranged from as small as 40 citizens to as large as 250. The most important factor is that all parts of the community feel included and are represented. Community Vision to Action Forums: An Organizer's Guide to Participatory Planning 11 Each community is unique, and it is up to the Forum Steering Committee to decide whether there are non-resident "stakeholders" who should also be included in the Forum event (for example: seasonal residents, people who work or own businesses in town but live elsewhere, etc.).

We suggest a minimum of 3 months from the first Steering Committee meeting to the date of the Forum event itself. This offers enough time for thorough planning and, most importantly, allows for the word to get out to ensure broad community participation. Some communities have taken as long as a year to plan the event, talking it up on the beach in the summer and at meetings of all the local organizations. In general, the shorter the planning time, the harder and faster the committee will have to work to get the word out.

Vital Communities and Antioch New England Institute staff developed the Vision to Action Forum model, drawing on models developed by the Cooperative Extension Services of the Universities of Vermont and New Hampshire and from a variety of current thinkers on community development. We developed the model to build in an emphasis on sustainability, community capacity building, inclusive participation, and an integrated assessment of community issues. The Forum process has been used successfully in scores of communities in the United States and Central Europe, from small villages to urban neighborhoods and from single municipalities to regional clusters of towns with similar concerns.