Emerging Stronger: Making Meaningful Progress with the Resources You Have
Unprecedented Resource Constraints
Most cities lack the resources to keep up with infrastructure and service demands, yet daily decisions have prioritized growth and short-term wins over long-term costs and impacts. The gap between expectations and resources was significant before COVID-19. Now, the pandemic and other recent events have put “business as usual” into a tailspin and have many of us questioning what’s really important in our communities, organizations, and personal lives. Meanwhile, local and state agencies are feeling the fiscal impacts of the shutdown, and city leaders are attempting to manage ever-changing circumstances and needs of citizens and businesses with unprecedented resource constraints.
Do these questions resonate with you?
Are you questioning the status quo in your community and grappling with how to prioritize and invest resources?
Do you struggle to communicate with citizens about the money needed to provide basic services versus the revenue you get from property tax and other sources?
Do you have a culture of trust and collaboration inside your organization and with your community where decisions are consistently based on shared vision, values and priorities, or are decisions made in silos, reactionary, and poorly communicated?
Are your staff or citizens apathetic and frustrated, or do you have an interested and energetic team/citizenry that is comfortable contributing their ideas and resources?
Are you looking for simple, affordable steps you can take right now with the resources you DO have to improve quality of life for residents, strengthen local businesses, and make your community more resilient coming out of the COVID pandemic?
Resource-conscious Solutions
If you’re an elected or appointed official, city manager, or department leader looking for ways to maximize the people, plans, and tools you’ve already put substantial investment into, our crew at Verdunity wants to help. We’re a planning, engineering, and engagement firm dedicated to education about the resource gap and helping city leaders and community builders identify and implement resource-conscious solutions that embrace community collaboration and incremental improvement.
Put simply, we want to help cities make meaningful progress right now with the resources you have. We don’t believe in elaborate plans that attempt to predict the future or complicated expensive infrastructure projects that take years to get done with money that isn’t available. We advocate for simple plans and strategies that address issues you have right now for your current residents and businesses and make use of the resources you do have.
We’re in the middle of a free training webinar series where my colleague AJ Fawver and I are covering elements of our Cultivate Community Framework we use to help city leaders align vision, policies, and investments with what citizens are willing and able to pay for so that you can close your city’s resource gap and make your community relevant, unique, and long-lasting. AJ came to our team after 16 years of working in Texas cities leading planning and development services departments, so she’s been where you are. We’ve applied this framework in a variety of ways including strategic and comprehensive plans, citizen education and engagement programs, and neighborhood revitalization projects.
Verdunity’s Cultivate Community Framework
Here’s a quick overview of the modules we’ve already covered, and what’s ahead. Links to register for upcoming webinars, replays of all webinars and access to the accompanying exercise sheets (PDFs) are available on our Webinars page.
Module 1 - Getting More From the Tools You Already Have (aka Assess Existing Plans and Tools)
With so many unknowns and competing priorities, local governments can’t afford internal inefficiencies, nor can you afford to spend precious dollars on additional plans to start over or projects that add more long-term liabilities. The fact is, every community invests a lot of time, resources, and dollars into developing plans and regulations - we want to help you extract the value and capitalize on the work that’s already been completed. Internal plans and processes are something you can still influence and improve. In the first webinar, AJ and I cover three areas of your city’s operations you have full control over that impact your city’s service levels, budgets, and culture:
How to assess your existing plans, development regulations, and processes to identify areas of alignment, conflict, and duplication;
Why addressing these areas can inspire a next level of focus, energy, and commitment within your team;
How making improvements in these areas helps your organization to be more efficient today while also establishing a foundation to address future needs.
Module 2 - Assessing Existing Resources
While resources in cities are limited, there are usually opportunities to leverage what you have to do more. This webinar focuses on how to assess resource gaps and identify ways to maximize land, buildings, infrastructure, city staff, and community partners. Some of the topics we cover in this module include:
How to use land use fiscal analysis to quantify the costs and revenue productivity of your city’s land, buildings, and infrastructure - and how it can be used to align your city’s development pattern and service model with what residents are willing and able to pay for;
How to align and inspire your existing staff to maximize engagement and achievement of priority outcomes;
How to identify and tap into other partners in the community that are often overlooked but can be powerful partners and “implementers.”
Module 3 - Evaluating Community Engagement Efforts
The third and final element of the assessment phase in our framework is evaluating how you’re doing on communicating with your citizens. In this webinar, AJ and I break down the topic of community engagement and discuss a few specific ways you can evaluate:
WHO you are engaging - and who’s being left out;
HOW you’re engaging people - and other methods you may not be thinking about;
WHEN to engage them;
And the most important one of all, WHY you’re engaging them - and how to better connect with citizens to increase the frequency and quality of your engagement efforts.
Module 4 - Prioritizing Desired Outcomes
Having a clearly defined vision and guiding principles that are consistently communicated and applied throughout your community and inside city hall can make navigating times like this much easier. Without them, defining what progress or success looks like and prioritizing actions can be very difficult, time consuming, and frustrating for everyone involved. Now more than ever, cities need a shared vision and guiding principles to bring people and perspectives together, improve trust and communication, and prioritize resources and actions. In this webinar, we build on the discussions from previous modules and expand on three areas:
Identifying a purpose and rallying cry that’s unique to your community and that the majority of people can and want to connect with;
Establishing community values and guideposts for decision making that transcend individuals or council administrations;
Defining shared outcomes and establishing critical objectives, measures, and actions.
Understanding tradeoffs
I share a process and tools that private companies, government agencies, and other groups have used to overcome these challenges, and AJ shares her perspective as someone who’s worked inside local government and why sticking to this process can sometimes be hard to achieve and maintain.
Upcoming Modules - Developing A Plan, Executing Incrementally, and Communicating Progress
In the remaining webinars, we’ll be working through how to identify, connect, and empower city and community resources to work together; how to embrace incremental implementation; and, how to communicate progress and lessons learned. The next webinar will be on Friday, July 31st. You can register for this and the other remaining webinars over on our Webinars page.
At the conclusion of the webinar series, we’ll be offering a virtual version of our Cultivating Community workshop that expands on how to apply these concepts in your community. We are also exploring the possibility of an in-person version in Dallas this fall for a limited number of attendees. If you’re interested in getting notified as the details for these workshops materialize and getting access to an “early bird” registration discount, email us at info@verdunity.com with the subject “Workshop” and we’ll get you on the email list.
Putting the framework to work in your community
If you want to take a shot at working through this process yourself, we’ve provided PDFs with each webinar that will get you started. If you have questions along the way and need some support, hop over to our online community—the Community Cultivators Network—where our team and other local government change agents are sharing and discussing ideas.
If you’re interested but just too busy to do this yourself or want someone to coach you through it, our team would be honored to partner with you. You can get more information on our COVID discounts and request a quote here.
Don’t let scarce resources keep you from moving your community forward
The key to addressing today’s challenges while positioning for a strong recovery isn’t to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into updating plans and projects. Instead, it’s to make modest investments that will maximize the tools and resources that you already have, bring your community together around common values and shared outcomes, and cultivate more healthy, inclusive, and resilient neighborhoods.
We acknowledge that accomplishing these things in a community is hard work, especially right now. But progress is still possible, and resource constraints don’t have to limit what is possible. We hope these webinars inspire you and give you some steps to explore in your community.
