It is common practice to create long-term plans for businesses, but what does it look like when you strategically plan for a place you call home?
Over the past year, enFocus has worked on two different projects that reimagine current communities to sustain long-term growth. The Niles-Buchanan strategic plan led by Fellow Marty Kennedy, and the Make Culver Home project led by Fellow Alayna Wort, both brought together stakeholders to understand community growth. Both Fellows were able to bring forward opportunities to leverage readily available resources to meet community goals by relying on quantitative and qualitative data from residents and local leaders.
Marty worked with an advisory committee in southwest Michigan to draw qualitative data through survey analysis and discussion facilitation. The information he and his project manager surfaced actionable projects in housing, quality of place, and business growth. Over the next five years, community leaders look forward to the implementation and execution of these projects.
When identifying and designing upcoming projects in southwest Michigan, Marty emphasizes the importance of community input sessions. He mentions, “Community input helps clarify what initiatives will benefit residents by providing direct context about the communities we serve. As enFocus is new to the Niles-Buchanan region, we receive community input through various channels to ensure our proposed strategic plan projects positively affect the Region.”
Marty Kennedy, alongside his Project Manager Shivangi Tiwari, created a survey, gathered regional leaders at town halls, and other feedback avenues to lay the foundational work for a strategic growth strategy. The foundation of the strategic plan has now resulted in actionable projects to advance the communities towards a set of goals within the next five years.
While the Niles-Buchanan strategic planning process strived to identify and design multiple types of projects, Make Culver Home is an example of a project that specifically focuses on one aspect of strategic growth. enFocus Fellow, Alayna Wort, worked to develop a marketing campaign through a remote worker attraction model. Together, Alayna and enFocus assisted Culver in leveraging resources available through the South Bend-Elkhart Regional Partnership and Make My Move to bring Culver’s ideas into reality.
Like Marty’s support in southwest Michigan, Alayna brought together regional collaborators to achieve economic and strategic growth of northwest Indiana. She helped develop a survey to understand community wants and needs, and went onto implement their input to shape initiatives in the region.
Alayna elaborates on her experience in collecting the quantitative and qualitative data through the Make Culver Home Project survey. She says “Through interviews and intentionally built surveys, the work revealed an overlapping priority across generations. We found that community is what encouraged people to stay and move to Culver."
Alayna learned valuable insights from the information she gathered and analyzed the survey to accurately represent resident feedback. She shares, “The Make Culver Home team recommended an intentional campaign to increase a sense of belonging in the community because of the survey work.” Now, Culver looks forward to implementing their campaign to attract new residents who are interested in remote work and spurring economic growth.
Both Marty and Alyna demonstrate how our Fellows are ready to meet communities where they are and learn how they want to grow through skills like survey analysis and discussion facilitation. We look forward to identifying areas of growth and digging deep into economic expansion to assist in strategically planning communities of the future.
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