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The Vision Thing
In charting a new course for Connecticut's cities,
the process may be more important than the product
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Business New Haven
7/3/1995
By: BNH
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No one seems entirely clear on exactly where, how or when it began, but the “Community Vision” process, by which communities take stock of their condition and try to plot broad-based, short- and long-term strategies for municipal well-being, has begun to make its mark on Connecticut. In our area Meriden, Waterbury and New Haven have embarked on the Vision journey with varying results. To discuss the Vision process and the product we invited Lee Campione, founder of Community Vision of Meriden; Campbell Lovett, vice chairman of the steering committee for the Vision for a Greater New Haven; and John Clizbe, coordinator of the Waterfront Task Force for the Vision for a Greater New Haven, to BNH's offices last month. Invitee William Placke, chief operating officer of Centerbank and a key figure in Waterbury's Vision effort, was unable to attend.
Meriden's Vision process began first. How did it get started?
Campione: It started when I called a meeting after a traumatic shooting in our community in April 1992. I called 18 key leaders in the community to breakfast a couple of days later. My concern was that the perception of our community was very negative. We had a wonderful community with an awful lot going for it; but between the newspaper [the Meriden Record-Journal; see related story, page 3] and people bad-mouthing it, the perception was very negative. My purpose was to tell people 1) that we had a great community and a lot of key leaders working in the community, but working in isolation - there was no cohesiveness - so I tried to bring many of them together. Our 18 grew to 40, which became our steering committee. At the same time, Patricia Sweet [senior vice president] of Centerbank was working with [Greater Meriden Chamber of Commerce director] Carol Way to put together a town meeting and leadership forum. That became our kickoff. In that meeting we heard a lot of complaints and a lot of suggestions, so we sat down in small groups and put together eight committees, which became the structure of our Vision process. We worked from a model supplied by our city manager from Burnsville, Minn., which we adapted to Meriden. Unlike Waterbury and New Haven, which followed after us, we had no executive staff, no money, we did no fundraising - we simply called on volunteers to offer their time. For the next ten months, the committees worked on establishing priorities.
What was the outcome?
Campione: The outcome was a booklet that became our model: Vision for a Better Meriden: Actions Recommended. There are 57 recommendations in here, which we presented to the city council and the city manager, which endorsed them, and directed their department heads to work closely with us. In February 1993, we went to work implementing them. About a year later we issued a biannual report, which was our report card, and showed that each of the committees had shown some positive results. What we have realized, however, is that we are going to fall apart if we don't get an executive director, and a staff, and an office and some funding. So we have organized as a tax-exempt, non-profit corporation and we are about to put together a fundraising campaign to pull these pieces together. Also, we are selling memberships to the community [for $2], so we're hoping to broaden the effort.
Is your steering committee going to continue to track progress toward the goals you've outlined?
Campione: Yes. Of the 57 goals we started with, it says [in the most recent report] that we had completed about a third of them. As these goals are being achieved, we're adding new ones all the time.
Didn't the original Vision process begin in Chattanooga, Tenn.?
Clizbe: You hear a lot about Chattanooga primarily because Gianni Longo, the consultant that New Haven used, had done a lot of work in Chattanooga. A lot of what we've tried to do in New Haven is work from what Longo did in Chattanooga.
How did New Haven's Vision get started?
Lovett: There were a lot of concurrent conversations going on in City Hall, among church groups, at the [Greater New Haven] Chamber of Commerce, trying to assess where New Haven was going. [Chamber President] Matt Nemerson really was a catalyst because he said, 'I've heard of this project in Hartford,' which did a Vision project in the late 1980s. So some of us went to Hartford and met with some of them in the winter of 1992-93. After that we tried to create a model [using other cities' experiences], and we had a meeting at the library with 70 people we thought might be interested and said, 'Let's begin to talk.' It's interesting to hear Lee talk about what Meriden has accomplished, because Hartford was the opposite extreme. They raised $400,000, and the first year they had an enormous staff. They had amazing goals and publications - and not much ended up happening.
John, how did you get involved?
Clizbe: I was not involved on the front end; I came in later. Where most of us became involved was through a series of meetings that were held throughout the area - at schools, elderly housing - where the public was invited; we ended up having roughly 2,000 people participate in those. So what's been special from my point of view is that it hasn't been a top-down process; it has been driven by grass-roots recommendations. Let's say 2,000 recommendations came out of those 2,000 mouths; then those same people come together again and say, 'How do we organize this stuff?'; so then task forces and committees evolved out of those recommendations from the citizenry to feed stuff up to the steering committee.
How did it evolve from there?
Lovett: We really wavered through the first summer about what it was that we were going to do, and that's when we found Gianni Longo. Then we interviewed folks who could help us design and implement a process - we were more interested in the process than in a structure. At the community meetings about 3,000 ideas were generated; with the Vision fair on the Green about 600 people came. Then we started categorizing and prioritizing the goal areas, and came up with 33 that were crucial. We had 400 people sign up to be on committees; they began to meet for 100 days and would suggest short-, medium- and long-range possibilities of how to accomplish their committee's goal.
Have the people on the committees remained enthusiastic and involved about their work?
Lovett: It depends on the committee. Some of the committees combined - Youth and Recreation, for instance - some did their 100 days' work and folded, saying, 'Here's our plan.' There are probably 20 citizen-action groups that are still working. The more concrete and task-oriented [the committee's mission] has been, the better the involvement. More nebulous ones like Crime and Family have been a little slower.
Will the Special Olympics, or its aftermath, have an effect on the Vision process?
Lovett: It will certainly free up a volunteer pool [laughs].
Clizbe: It may even free up resources. Sooner or later money unavoidably becomes an issue, and the Special Olympics has drawn the attention and the resources of contributors, corporate and otherwise, which has made it difficult. In fact, all of us in the Vision process have almost avoided going out to raise funds - we just don't want to put another load on the community. I also think there is the potential for the Special Olympics to create a sense of momentum and a sense of, 'Hey, volunteerism really does work.'
How does all this effort become consolidated - or does it?
Lovett: The steering committee said, 'We need to give more of a centralized focus to our work. It's good that we have all these groups doing their own thing or working in collaboration with others...' So we went through the 100-day reports and research of all the groups and suggested three main priorities for now: a homestead act for housing, helping to rehab or tear down 600 units in New Haven, helping to establish home-ownership programs, and helping to build up and develop the neighborhoods through housing programs. A second priority is transportation: helping to establish a more coordinated and effective transportation plan both for those outside the city coming in, but also for people in the city moving out, because transcending all our priorities were job creation, job retention and job issues. And as jobs move from the core city to outside, we need a transportation plan that can help folks who live in the city get to the jobs in the suburbs. The third priority we're suggesting is an international arts festival for 1996.
Lee, when you begin to raise money to hire staff, will you be looking entirely toward private sources?
Campione: We've already had a luncheon with our foundations. It was very impressive to me because foundations usually look to the head of United Way to see if he approves this sort of fundraising, and he is actually co-chair of one of our committees. One of the greatest strengths of Vision is that we have taken all of the agencies and brought them together in one room. So we have all the social-service agencies and housing agencies and arts and economic-development agencies sitting down and talking. And he felt that that in itself was such a positive act in our community that he told the foundations that he would put Vision at the top of the priority list. Having heard that, I think the foundations will be willing to support us. And some of the major corporations represented on our committees have certainly helped to keep us afloat to date for whatever out-of-pocket expenses [we incurred]. So I think supporters would be willing to come forth if we have a clear picture of what we're doing.
Where does municipal government fit into this process?
Campione: There were a lot of questions about how involved to get the city government. [Vision] was a private, non-political, non-partisan citizens [initiative] - and that has been our strength. We had a lot of support from the previous administration. The new administration that came into power in November 1993, not knowing much about Vision, saw us somewhat as a threat and took a lot of what we were doing in-house. Our response was, simply, 'We're here to help you. If you can do it in-house better, please do it. Our goal is to get it done, and we don't care who does it.' And little by little, Vision has re-established its credibility with city government.
It seems that in both cities, what keeps the momentum going is the fervor of the volunteers. Going back to New Haven for a moment, where have been the points of resistance, or what creates a drag on the process?
Lovett: Well, one factor is that we have a one-and-a-half-person office. Another factor is distrust of the process by those who have not been involved from the beginning. We've tried to be as open as possible and include people; one of our goals as well has been to work on the issue of diversity.
Clizbe: Another issue we have to be sensitive to is the extraordinary amount of hard work people are putting into this process. There is certainly the risk of burnout, and we have to keep finding ways to bring in new people and new enthusiasm. It's not just physically hard work; these issues are not easy issues. It requires a lot of negotiation and a lot of give and take.
Well, Vision is about facilitating change. At the top of your steering committee you have the mayor, the bishop, the head of the chamber of commerce, and the president of Yale. Those institutions are not necessarily known as engines of radical change.
Clizbe: In our committee {Waterfront], at least, we just did it and asked questions later. We found that these institutional representatives were very supporting and encouraging of the process, whether or not they initiated the ideas. The chamber of commerce has been very supportive with resources and people and financial help. So I personally have not found the historic institutions of the city to be barriers.
An ideologue might say that New Haven has historically been resistant to change because real power has been concentrated in so few hands, and those hands necessarily defend the status quo.
Lovett: We're in a time when that status quo is different than it used to be. Besides Yale, we're talking about groups that have lost a tremendous amount of power since the 1950s as [people and companies] have moved outside of the city. With President [Richard] Levin coming to Yale, he's much more open to community and city involvement, realizing that if he's going to raise money for the university, it has to be in a place that has some stability, and where the alumni and the incoming classes feel good about being here. Our chamber of commerce is probably the most progressive in the state.
How successful have your efforts been in both cities in building public awareness of the Vision process?
Campione: At our initial town meeting people stood up and listed as the greatest negative force in our town the [Meriden Record-Journal]. I would not accept the fact that people just complained about it; so I invited the publisher and the [executive] editor to come onto one of the committees. And they did, and they've worked very hard and been tremendous community supporters. Community Vision has received a lot of coverage in the newspaper, so people who read the newspaper should know that Vision exists. We also thought that by selling memberships to the community for $2 we would make people more aware of it, and we're just starting to do that. However, we have a very large minority population in Meriden, and we simply haven't done a good enough job there. One of the things we are doing to change that is to start a leadership-training program, from management to teaching people how to be good participants in meetings, and hopefully teaching minority people how to participate and become good leaders in the community. I think that will go a long way toward maintaining our credibility.
How about in New Haven?
Lovett: I'd say there's good name recognition of 'Vision.' But people might have trouble putting a specific handle on the results. That's why we're trying to do more public relations, communication and fundraising. I think that's the next step. A lot of good things are happening, and the next challenge is to say, 'Okay, how do we package it to build some momentum.'
For now, the Vision initiatives in Connecticut are all city-based. Practically speaking, can we really hope to reverse the decline of our cities without fundamental property-tax reform at the state level?
Campione: No.
Lovett: No.
Clizbe: No.
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