Community Workshop #3 Summary
On October 15th, over 50 West End neighbors joined the planning team for a community workshop around questions in prioritization
On October 15th, over 50 West End neighbors joined the planning team for a community workshop around questions in prioritization and perception of the neighborhood. Better Family Life was gracious enough to host us for this meeting.
Those in attendance had an opportunity to enjoy some food, catch up with friends, and fill out the community aspirations survey that will help guide the process once the plan writing begins. (Click here to take the survey if you haven’t taken it yet!)
Our Mission and Vision
The steering committee was able to present the vision and mission statements statement for the planning process which serve as the underlying core values statements which drive the process.
The vision statement is:
A unified, thriving, safe, desirable community where history is embraced, and all are welcome to make it home.
The mission statement is:
A thriving community implementing socially just strategies that offer quality housing, education, nutrition and healthcare needed to cultivate a safe, desirable place to live, learn, work and play.
Updates on the timeline and process
As part of the informative section of the meeting, a presentation was given with status updates and discussing the community engagement strategy in more detail. You can download that presentation here.
Data from the meeting
For this meeting, the planning team partnered with the City of St. Louis to conduct real time survey data around how residents felt about a wide variety of topics. Using polling software, neighbors in attendance were given hand-held remotes where they could answer questions as they appeared on the screen. The analysis from this meeting will help to inform the planning process going forward as well as the final plan itself. While this analysis is very much still a work in progress, some of the takeaways include:
Neighbors feel strongly that the condition of housing, parks, and businesses are poor and need a great deal of attention.
Safety is a substantial concern.
People generally like the homes in the neighborhood, and the presence of vacancy diminishes that potential.
Traffic impeding pedestrians does not contribute to unpleasantness, and there are remaining infrastructure challenges to crossing the handful of busy roads.
Other questions showed that in some areas the neighbors are unified in what the answers are and for others there is more of a split. You can download the results of the interactive polling here.