
What happened at community workshop #2
August 29, 2019 West End Planning Team
On August 20th, neighbors from the West End and Visitation Park attended the West End Planning public working meeting #2 at the Union Avenue Christian Church.
The meeting was broken down into two parts.
First was the presentation, which included some high-level information about the planning process, as well as a status update both around both where we are in the planning process, as well as what was heard at previous meetings that we are working towards incorporating into all efforts going forward. This will include not just the planning document, but how the planning team continues to structure the community outreach. In the future, these types of “report-out” activities will be limited to executive summaries for public meetings, and the planning team will establish meetings separate from larger public working meetings, to specifically discuss the findings of prior engagement.
The presentation that was given can be downloaded as a PDF here.
Second was the public participation activities, which included four topic themed stations (with discussions facilitated by a member of the planning team) with complimentary maps. The topic areas of focus were:
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Business and Economic Development
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Housing and Community Development
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Health, Youth and Safety
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The Built Environment (infrastructure, greenspace, etc.)
Neighbors were asked to place dots on the map to indicate if they liked what was happening in a location (green dot), if they didn’t like what was going on (red dot) or if they saw somewhere as an area of opportunity (yellow dot). To document additional comments to help put the dots into perspective, neighbors who wished to expand on why they put a sticker dot where they did were encouraged to write a number on the dot, as well as the corresponding number on a notecard along with their additional comments.
Along with the mapping stations, there were two other public participation activities: A SWOT analysis activity similar to the one from the first meeting, and a headline activity, where participants were asked to craft a headline from the future around what things would be happening in the west end.