Strategic Planning for Sustainable Communities

Five E’s Unlimited can assist a community to develop sound strategies for achieving sustainable development, which we characterize as the ability of humans to harmoniously coexist in a manner that maintains wildlife, wildlands, decent environments, social equality, and economic well-being today and for future generations. Five E's most often chooses to work with communities that show a deep concern for environmental sustainability as it relates to the social and economic capacity concerns of people.

For more detail about the specifics of what we do, review our work with the Dauphin Island Community on the Gulf Coast of Alabama (USA). This case history will give you a good example of what we do, how we do it, and the outcomes we can assist you in achieving.

We assist clients to integrate environmental, economic, and social equity concerns into project design and problem solving that focuses upon community-based natural resource management, comprehensive planning, promotion of environmental sustainability in watershed and coastal zone strategic plan development, community awareness and capacity building, and sustainable eco-tourism planning. We put into layman's terms science needed by communities, organizations, and governments to achieve economic prosperity and improve social well-being, compatible with natural environmental systems. Our national and international leadership in community capacity-building facilitation and strategic planning toward achieving sound economic development and natural resource conservation goals has assisted governments, corporations, academic institutions, communities, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for more than 10 years.

We are experts in public participation. We have broad and varied experience with all aspects of the public consultation process and can guarantee it will be transparent, consensual, and inclusive through the application of transformative facilitation strategies. We see public consultation as the foundation for achieving the following in our community work:

1. Understanding for where the community has been with planning activities that will appreciably inform the project and what the stakeholder aspirations and core values look like regarding a future, sustainable community, which will require:
2. the community’s deep and extensive science-based understanding of ecological, economic, and social sustainability, in all of its temporal, spatial and systemic dimensions, communicated effectively to participants and stakeholders in a way that inspires vision and action, to inform:
3. a thoroughly community-based and community-driven process of deliberation and decision making, engaging all stakeholders in the identity of weaknesses and threats as well as community assets, and capable of guiding the making of difficult trade-offs while creating cohesive win-win solutions, whose outcomes are expressed in:
4. a solid, comprehensive, implementable strategic plan fulfilling all best-practice planning and statutory requirements, which will identify the necessary resources to overcome challenges and take advantage of opportunities, and will be a model for change management that effectively guides the community in actions toward a successful, resiliently enduring future.

We are fully capable of providing support for local and regional community driven initiatives through information and visualizations created using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). We have found that GIS platforms can become a “chess board” to anchor discussion and debate. Mapping is an important technique for collecting "heart and soul" features of a community. We use maps and other electronic visualizations to illustrate landscape conditions and environmental patterns that facilitate debate and consensus development in support of strategic planning. With maps specific to local conditions people can work collaboratively to improve and continuously update their understanding of what their community and surrounding environment really look like, as well as what potential assets they possess that will be important in visualizing their future.

Our community sustainability work focuses upon developing a long-term strategy and implementation plan that will help a community in achieving sustainability goals that they, themselves identify for improving community economic opportunities and social vitality in environmentally sound ways. A typical community assistance process includes the following:

1. review existing documents and statutes applicable to future development;
2. provide stakeholder sustainability awareness and inventory all stakeholder place-based interests, values, practices, and future vision;
3. conduct community asset identification via public consultation;
4. develop visual frameworks of historical and current conditions that will influence changes in environment, community development, and cultural views;
5. plan and design management strategies through public participation, including the visualization of possible futures and related timelines for progress; and
6. promote implementation of management strategy and measurement processes.

The services of Five E’s Unlimited will enhance the coming together of all interested stakeholders to broaden their collective wisdom in a way that will enable the community to articulate and evaluate the best strategies for ensuring economic viability and social integrity through means that are environmentally sustainable. These strategies will be able to be “tested” using what-if and futuring scenarios, testing for example alternative choices in land use, transportation, water quality, waste management, economic strategies (i.e., eco-tourism versus small-scale industrial development), where the community will be able to develop consensus on a course of action most appropriate and sustainable, as perceived by the majority of stakeholders.

If you are interested in discussing a strategic planning process that your group might want to engage in, contact Five E's at (e-mail) rwflint@eeeee.net or (telephone) 206-749-9755. You can also go to the Response Form of this site to contact us discussing your strategic planning needs for sustainability.

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