Strategic Planning:
A New Approach

This is a different type of planning process. Our Vision 20/20 plans have been very successful and made the Springfield metropolitan area a better place to live and work. However, we must:

  1. Recognize we are planning within a very different economic climate.
  2. Recognize levels of trust in government (and, in some cases, each other) are low.
  3. Take a regional approach to solving many of our current and upcoming challenges.
  4. Better engage our citizens, including our next generation of citizens and leaders.

To address these realities, we have adjusted the planning process as indicated below.

New Planning Categories Included

This plan will address some community priorities that have never been included in our community strategic plan before, including public safety, public health, global perspectives and diversity, economic development, and early childhood development. Additionally, we have added a new chapter called Progressive Management that is an inward-looking plan for how the City's government must change and adapt to support the initiatives contained within other chapters, as well as continue to provide core services to our citizens. While various community entities have conducted planning on each of these areas in the past, we believe this is the first time those elements are being woven into the fabric of the community plan.

Four Themes

The various planning committees were asked to develop their chapters with the following four themes in mind:

In fact, each planning committee was asked to specifically address how their chapter of the plan will address each of these four cross-chapter themes.

Metropolitan Focus

Staff from the City of Springfield and Greene County are working collaboratively to host the development of this metropolitan plan. Citizens from the City and those living outside the City limits are participating on all planning committees.

Focus on Planning Category Inter-relationships

For example how do (or should) the arts impact our economic development? How does (or should) our transportation system impact our health? How does (or should) our level of community health impact early childhood development? How does (or should) early childhood development impact our long-term level of public safety? How does (or should) public safety impact our housing trends? These are just a few examples of the web of inter-connectedness on which the Strategic Plan Coordinating Committee will focus. We do not yet know what the resulting picture will look like, but we believe the process to develop it will be both challenging and interesting.

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Strength Matrix
Chapter Themes

Collaborative Committee Member Selection

We appointed planning committee co-chairs (typically based on their level of expertise in the topic), solicited a few topic experts from some large institutions (universities, colleges, and governmental institutions), reserved a slot for a young professional representative from The Network, and then allowed the co-chairs to select their own citizen-members from the list of citizens who expressed some level of interest in that topic as a result of our solicitation of interest. Committee co-chairs were encouraged to limit the total committee membership to a reasonable number to ensure the process didn’t get bogged down. We believe each pair of co-chairs did a nice job of selecting a diverse set of citizens – many citizens selected were unknown to the co-chairs. Those citizens who applied to serve on planning committees, but were not selected, are being given the opportunity to serve on various citizen focus groups as the planning committees develop draft chapters.

Budget & Funding Included

We required each planning committee to include a budget with each major goal/initiative proposed, as well as attempt to identify funding sources. We are hopeful this will result in a community plan that is both creative and fiscally responsible.

Effort to Include Younger Citizens

As we envision our community’s future 20 years from now, many of our young people will become our community leaders. Thus, they should have a voice in both creating that vision and designing the plan to help us reach that vision. We have made it a priority to reach out to our next generation via Listening Tour meetings in elementary, middle, and high schools; the Visioning Challenge for college/university and high school students, and the inclusion of a member of The Network on every planning committee.

Shorter Duration, Different Format

Our intention is for this plan to be a truly strategic plan – filling in the details will be worked out later via other processes. The final plan will provide a consistent format between chapters and include color graphics and photos. By focusing on strategic issues (thus limiting the length and level of detail in this plan) and formatting it in a more appealing manner, we hope this plan will be more “readable” to our citizens and all will be able to identify the plan’s major initiatives and strategies.

New Vision, New Name

While “Vision 20/20” was a plan name that was both clever and easy to remember, we are currently visioning out to the year 2030. We needed a new name and have chosen "Field Guide 2030" as the name for this strategic plan.