The purpose of the dialogues are to learn about how Venture addressed issues, with what results, and how Venture’s approach might be applied today, building on its results. The first dialogue will focus on the practice of community engagement — the practice and process of involving diverse, representative residents/stakeholders of an area in deciding how resources should be acquired, identified, and mobilized for goal-attainment and improvement — rather than a specific issue. Here are the general questions for the dialogue:

How was community engagement identified and adopted as an approach to planning? How was it developed as a practice of Venture?
What was the legacy of Venture’s efforts? How has community engagement been used in recent planning efforts?
How are we engaging community members today? What are current goals and purposes for community engagement?
What other issues might benefit from community engagement? Should we have more and, if so, how might it be done? What do you want to do with or get out of community engagement? Who will lead and support the effort?

Ron Littlefield, former mayor, first executive director of Venture, and key leader in establishing Venture will be our primary discussant. We will involve folks with the City and RPA for the second question and representatives of All in Chattanooga and National Park City for the third. All attendees will be asked to answer the fourth question and share feedback on responses to earlier questions.

Promote the event to your associates, friends, and neighbors! The registration link is https://luma.com/cz0hwuhv. What else do you need for this?
Assist with logistics, preparation, and clean up. Come early to help with set up. Help folks sign in, make name tags, find seats, etc. Stay afterward to put everything back.
Facilitate table discussion around the last set of questions and read out results.
Help plan future sessions. I’m leading the effort for the first two or three sessions but plan to hand this off to others. Two key challenges are to find financial support to cover costs and select topics that were addressed by Venture but also relevant today.

Another challenge for the whole group is how to apply knowledge from Venture to issues of today that were not issues in the past such as caring for the aging, disabled, and children, mobility and transportation, and needs for deferred maintenance and mitigating negative impacts of growth.

You may reply directly to this email but remember emails to cvsg@list.chattanooga.digital go to all fifty some people who have expressed interest in participating in the Study Group. Please make sure your response is relevant to everyone. You may also reply directly to me and/or Kate Rudder who is helping with logistics and programming.