Chamber 'envisioning' a brighter future for city, county
Jennifer Sami
06/25/06
When it comes to the county’s future, the Cumming-Forsyth County Chamber of Commerce is already there.
Under the leadership of Carter Barrett and Brett Berto, a vision program is already well in place.
After forming a steering committee, complete with community leaders and chamber board members, the group’s first task was a project name The choices were narrowed, to Visualize 2030, Project 2030 and the final choice, Envision 2030, which earned 12 of the 18 votes.
“We came up with a bunch of them before our final choice. A lot of them were names that would not go, but we wanted to get people thinking about what this whole visioning process should be named. From there it was a process of elimination,” said Berto.
Envision 2030 began with a day-long summit in March, where 100 community leaders met to discuss the county’s future. “The support from the leadership summit was an overwhelming inspiration to continue to press forward with the process,” said Barrett. “We have since formed a steering committee and we’re currently in the process of trying to raise the money to fund this effort. We’re reaching out to business owners and individuals for contributions so we can fund this entire effort out of donations.”
Now that a name has been selected the committee’s next project is to finalize locations for meetings throughout the county. The meetings will be more of a public forum, inviting members of the community to voice their concerns and suggestions for the direction they thing the county should be heading toward.
“We want to make sure we cover the entire county. We want to make sure no one is able to say, ‘Well they didn’t do a meeting in my part of the county,’ he said. “We don’t want to go through these sessions and put preconceived notions through their heads. We want people to come to these meetings and tell us their thoughts. We’re looking for new ideas. This should be a citizen-driven initiative.”
Ten meetings will be held between September and November, all in middle and high schools in the county.
Barrett said he expects “big, monster ideas” from the community, which is why he is coordinating an event in August to jump-start the brainstorming process. The meeting will feature a “true visionary” as a guest speaker to help spark ideas.
“Our goal is to start planting some seeds out there to encourage thought-provoking ideas within the community. We don’t want to wait until our meetings start in September and then just starting to think about what the community is going to be like in the future,” he said. “We want them to start thinking about that, before that; we want them to show up prepared to start talking about what they want their county to be like before September. My job is to get people thinking early.”
Though community involvement will not peak until after summer, the 25-member steering committee is actively involved in the effort on a weekly basis.
Among upcoming projects, a Web site will be established for Envision 2030.
“Every week, myself, Carter Barrett and Leigh Crow, as well as Otis White from Civic Strategies, the consultant on the project, are getting together for a planning session,” said Berto. Something is going on every week. It’s an ongoing planning effort for this fall.” | | Related Link
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