News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
A group of community leaders and activists is set to move ahead with a project that is supposed to create a long-term strategic vision for Sisters and strategies to carry it out.
The heads of a range of Sisters agencies met Monday, May 15, for an initial “community summit.” The consensus from that summit was that the project is worth pursuing.
“We got a sense that there was support for the project,” said Bill Anthony, chair of the Community Action Team of Sisters Board of Directors and one of the project coordinators. “We did not get any feedback that said ‘do not go forward’.”
The project leaders did, however, get a lot of feedback about how the project should be conducted.
“Communicate, communicate, communicate” was the theme most often expressed, Anthony said. That means explaining the project to the community and soliciting widespread support and participation.
The first step in that communication will be a community survey to be disseminated throughout the summer, asking citizens and visitors to the area what they value about Sisters, what their concerns are about the future and how they would like to see the community develop over the next decades.
Further meetings and direct community involvement will not happen until the fall because so many people in Sisters are either busy with summer activities and business or on vacation.
City Manager Eileen Stein said part of the communication process will be explaining why the project has an eight or nine month timeline and why it will cost $102,000.
Anthony said project organizers are particularly concerned that the public understand that funding for the project comes mostly from grants, in-kind contributions and donations from agencies and civic organizations.
The City of Sisters contributed $10,000 and the local fire district also contributed, but Anthony emphasized that the plan is “not a large, public taxpayer project.”
Both Stein and Anthony said they had hoped for broader participation in the summit, but agreed that the attendance was “solid.”
Stein noted that a previous “community summit” that had called for a vision plan was better attended than the May 15 meeting. One key player — SOAR — did not participate due to a scheduling conflict.
“My personal impression is (that) you wish you had every single board member of every single agency there,” she said.
One of the challenges facing project leaders is creating a plan that gets results rather than wallowing in process. Several participants in Monday’s summit called for “less vision, more leadership.”
“We all want an actionable plan,” Anthony said. “Nobody wants a plan that’s just another plan.”
Stein said that a previous “visioning” project in 1999/2000 created a strategic vision for Sisters and that vision is probably still valid. She acknowledged that the qualities most people value are pretty easily arrived at: economic vitality, good schools, safety, sense of community and small-town feel, etc.
“Perhaps what we need to do is test that vision instead of recreating the vision,” she said.
To emphasize measurable action she said the plan needs to ask “what do we do to further that vision and who’s going to do what?”
Accountability and collaboration, particularly for the agencies that will have to enact the plan, is a key element, Stein said. She thinks a strategic vision will help a broad cross section of the community to pull together toward specific goals.
“We’ve gotten some amazing things done,” she said, “but I’m not sure we’re all running in a straight line as agencies.”
Stein said that strong collaboration “is what I hope comes from this (project) and that’s why I think it’s worth doing.”
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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