Stand

THE BOARD & COMMUNITY ROUNDTABLE

THE STAFF

THE VOLUNTEERS AND SUPPORTERS

Stand is a community visioning effort. By Chattanoogans, for Chattanoogans.

Stand believes the next big thing for the Chattanooga region is a thousand little things. Our mission is to engage community members to express their ideas for the future, organize around common purposes and translate vision into action.

A visioning process begins by bringing the future into the hands of a city’s people—recording needs and successes through surveys, open dialogue and community forums. Stand started with a four-question survey and an initial goal of collecting responses from residents across the Chattanooga region. Just five months later, we’ve collected over 26,000 responses, providing us with a diverse data sample and making Stand the largest survey-based community visioning effort in the world.

An informed community is a powerful thing. The results of Stand’s survey effort will be released to the public in early 2010. From there, Stand will encourage, enable and facilitate as many people in as many places as possible in creating their own changes to benefit not only those who filled out a survey, but the entire region—and like-minded cities everywhere.

Chattanooga is a creative place, one that has reinvented itself time and again over the last forty years. The Stand initiative represents the latest incarnation of our city’s spirit for self-reflection and community betterment.

In 1984, fifteen years after Walter Cronkite referred to Chattanooga as “the dirtiest city in America” on the evening news, a handful of Chattanooga’s leaders formed Chattanooga Venture and launched Vision2000, which set 40 goals for the city to achieve by the year 2000. These goals fell under the categories of future alternatives, places, people, work, play and government and covered everything from strengthening the downtown area to solving existing air, water, and toxic waste problems to creating before and after school programs.

By 2000, many of the original goals had been realized. Chattanooga is now known as “The Scenic City” and in 2008, the city was named by Outside Magazine as one of the best places to live in the US.

Building on the monumental foundation of Vision2000’s initiatives over the last twenty-five years, Stand was conceived in July 2008 by a diverse group of concerned citizens driven to enable a shared vision for the future of their community.

In May 2009, the campaign was launched by a dedicated team of staff and volunteers armed with yellow t-shirts, a website, and several thousand paper surveys. Stand hosted, coordinated and attended events of all kinds, engaging residents in all corners of the Chattanooga region—from shopping centers to house parties to neighborhood gatherings to festivals and rock shows. Over the course of five months, our field organizers created relationships with municipal leaders, organizations, businesses, churches and individuals.

By August 31, 2009, Stand had received over 19,400 responses, officially making the Chattanooga region home to the largest survey-based visioning campaign, surpassing imagineCALGARY’s former record at over 18,000.

As of September 30, 2009, Stand has closed the survey phase of our efforts with 26,001 responses, surpassing our own goal of 25,000 by a thousand and one. The results are currently being processed by the Ochs Center for public release in early 2010, and the Stand team is continuing to engage the community to ensure that the results will be distributed in useful formats to as many people in as many places as possible in order to spark meaningful conversations, enable emerging leaders, and strengthen preexisting networks.

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 then release all the data, scrubbed of identifying information, in a searchable database available to the public.

Stand is committed to providing the community the information, tools, and resources necessary to identify shared priorities through public dialogue, build stronger connections between residents, leaders and organizations, and collaborate to turn vision into action.

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