Stand

Stand is about you—your neighborhood, your community, your city. If you have any questions for us, we want to address them as clearly and helpfully as possible. If you don’t find what you’re looking for here, please contact us.

25 years ago, Chattanooga reached a crossroads.  Facing economic, environmental and social challenges, a handful of city leaders rallied a few thousand citizens to identify problems and possibilities. Chattanooga Venture’s Vision 2000 process established a legacy of visioning in our community and played a significant role in the remarkable turnaround of Chattanooga’s downtown in the following years.

The community stands at another crossroads. In July 2008, Volkswagen announced Chattanooga as its choice for a North American manufacturing hub. This celebrated news raises an important question. Chattanoogans are asking, what’s next for us?

Downtown, in every neighborhood, across counties, and throughout the region: Stand invites you to help us build on the visioning process that began our community’s transformation 25 years ago. 

Visioning is a planning process where a community envisions the future it wants and begins to make it a reality. A community’s vision should reflect its core values, capturing diverse viewpoints, representing a wide variety of interests. Creating a vision requires deep and wide participation from people in all walks of life. Their input will more accurately show what we like about our community and what challenges we face, and their ideas will lead to plans and strategies for improving quality of life for everyone.

You do, along with every newcomer and lifelong resident, city-dweller and suburbanite, activist and skeptic, grandmother and grandchild, executive, housewife and homeless person in our region. Making a difference for the future depends entirely on those who get involved. That’s why we want to give voice to thousands of people and give each voice equal weight. Community change starts with people speaking up, standing up, standing together. It’s that simple and that powerful.

Chattanooga Venture was a not-for-profit organization that created and led Vision 2000, a goal-setting process with more than 1,700 local participants over a 20-week period in 1984. The ideas generated were used to shape 40+ goals for the city to accomplish by the year 2000, supporting citizens’ emphasis on quality of life. Vision 2000 led to more than 200 projects and programs and a community investment of over $800 million from public and private funders.

Building on Vision 2000, ReVision 2000 was initiated in 1993 and drew 2,600 participants, resulting in 27 goals and 122 recommendations for the future.

Stand hopes to build on the model established by these visioning processes, keeping a clear sense of our legacy. Like Vision 2000, Stand asks residents for their input and ideas about the community’s future. This time, we aim to reach more people representing more places than ever before, in the city and in the surrounding region.

It all started with a simple survey to be completed by every person in the Chattanooga region. Collecting over 26,000 responses in just five months, Stand is the world’s largest community visioning survey! Stand hopes to equip and empower groups of individuals, businesses and communities to work together to be part of and proud of our home.

Data entry and processing of the surveys is already underway at two independent organizations: the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies and the Center For Applied Social Research at UTC. The Ochs Center will prepare an executive summary of the results and relevant statistics, to be made public in early 2010. Stand will also release all the data, scrubbed of identifying information, in a searchable database available to the public.

The input from thousands of community members will identify common themes, challenges and ideas. As a community, we’ll identify shared priorities through public dialogue, build stronger connections between residents, leaders and organizations, and collaborate to turn vision into action.

Really, you are. A community’s visioning process has a real, lasting impact when citizens decide what they want for the future, and then do something about it. 

A growing and diverse group of people and organizations are partnering to collectively imagine what is possible for our future. While Stand is planned and driven by community members, a movement of this scale has associated costs. CreateHere has a continued interest in Chattanooga’s future, and has provided physical space, people power and organizational resources for this project. Core support is generously provided by the Benwood Foundation, the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga and the Lyndhurst Foundation. Visit the About page to see a list of people and organizations standing up to support and endorse Stand.

Early 2010 the results will be shared with the community at large through public forums, the Internet, news & media outlets, word of mouth and non-traditional, creative means. Stay tuned!

Yes, every response will be read by a person, not a computer. This work will be done by smart, thorough and dedicated individuals.

The Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies, along with UTC’s Center for Applied Social Research, is handling the data entry, coding and analysis.

When you fill out a survey, and it makes its way back to Stand HQ, it is stamped with a unique number. When surveys come back in bundles, such as from events, house parties or location-specific canvassing, we note the source and date they were collected too.

Each week, we take all collected paper surveys to The Ochs Center/Center for Applied Social Research. There, four experienced student researchers input the data digitally, exactly as it comes in, to a form similar to the online survey. Near the half-way point, they will conduct a data verification check on 5% of their data set. In other words - they’ll select digitally entered surveys at random and make sure the data matches what’s on the original paper survey.

Ochs and CASR are also working together to develop a qualitative coding rubric with broad categories and more specific sub-categories, based on themes they see emerging as the data is entered. Once this rubric is approved, the student researchers will begin assigning codes to survey responses that came in on paper and online. Once they’re about halfway through, people who haven’t handled the data thus far will conduct a mid-point coding verification check on 5% of responses, to see if the codes assigned to the responses correctly match the rubric.

Once all the data is coded, The Ochs Center will analyze it and produce an executive summary, which will likely include breakdowns of the data according to major themes, geographic location, demographics, etc. Stand’s goal is to return all this valuable information back to you in a format that’s easy to use, share and understand. Along with the executive summary, ALL the survey data will be shared openly with the public, after removing personal information, of course. So, if you want to know what people in your ZIP code had to say, you can sort and search at will.

We hope to be releasing the results after the start of 2010.

You and your friends and neighbors. You and people like you. You and people totally different from you who don’t know you, but want the same things as you. Stand’s goal is not to make sure that “somebody does something about it.” Instead, we want residents across the region to share an understanding of what needs to be done and a sense of responsibility for making it happen.

A great place to start - join our community roundtable planning meetings to talk about Stand’s next steps. We meet every Wednesday at 5 PM at Bluegrass Grill (55 E Main Street). The door is alway open for anyone committed to being hopeful and helpful.

The future of the Chattanooga region is up to us—to those who speak up and stand up to start working for tomorrow, today. This is your home, and it’s mine too. If we work together, there’s no end to what we can accomplish. Let’s redefine leadership and let’s be citizens, not just residents.