Now that we’re one-year, and about halfway through the Village Innovation Pilot, we have already learned quite a few lessons, from the mundane (now we know where to get the best pizza) to the lofty (local Pilot Teams are essential for project success). I wanted to take some time to put fingers to keyboard and spell out what I think are the most salient points we’ve learned in talking about villages, heart, and soul in Killingly and Exeter.
You Can’t Get Enough Participation, But Getting Participation is the Hardest Thing:
All visioning projects take a cue from the marketers of the world and rely on two tried and tested tools – money and word-of-mouth. An investment in mass mailings would probably have increased our attendance in both towns, but perhaps even more effectively in Exeter (being a small rural town with less meeting “noise”). We learned that lesson a little late, but we did allocate a little money for basic expenses, but if I were to budget this project again I would have tripled that budget line and felt confident it would have paid dividends in participation.
Where’s the Beef?
The word-of-mouth would have been more effective if there had been a little bit of, dare I say it, controversy or conflict. Citizens are reluctant to spend precious evening/weekend time discussing their future unless they feel like they have a stake in the outcome, and that is hard to do unless there is a very tangible thing that motivates them. Unfortunately, as so many planners and citizen volunteers know, those “motivating moments” often occur when the development plan is on the table, and not when the vision is laid out. If we had something to discuss that people had a beef with, our turnout would have soared. Moving forward we’ll have a bit more controversy about actual sites so I suspect we’ll get more folks tuning in.
There Is No Replacement For Motivated Citizen Volunteers:
It’s hard to imagine that in the first month or two of working with Killingly and Exeter that we were going to work solely with the town staff and elected officials. Both towns rightly said “We want to form a committee.” And thank goodness they did. Both “Pilot Teams” have been sources of energy, commitment, ideas, expertise, and of course local knowledge. Without their participation, the Pilot project simply wouldn’t have worked, in retrospect. I would suggest to anyone putting together a project like this add “local committee” to the top of their checklist, and push the elected officials to sanction, promote, and/or fill the committee. A community group will ground the project in the reality of the community you’re working in and will be a critical sounding board for a host of issues, from what space to use for the meeting to what scope the project should be.
Go Slow to Go Fast:
Even though it was too slow for some people, we spent a few extra months getting the local Pilot Team comfortable with the project and we spaced the public meetings out to allow the work to proceed. We had hoped to have the Heart and Soul done in six months, but in reality it took a year. But it was a year well spent. We have a cadre of committed volunteers who can speak for the project, and we built up enough awareness of the project so that we have a good foundation for moving forward on specific issues. This foundation is critical to the project gaining traction in the communities and in making real change possible for both town’s future.
I’m thrilled we’re making such good progress and that we’ve really hit on a core issue for these towns: compact development is indeed a good idea and there are many challenges to making that a reality. The next twelve months should reveal a lot about what specific things need to happen to make that vision a reality.
Kevin Essington, Dir., Borderlands Landscape Program, The Nature Conservancy