Community Pulse: Coal City updates strategic planning process

At the end of the spring, the Coal City community will embark upon community MAPPING. This is an effort to develop a strategic vision for the future.

Many organizations follow a strategic visioning process by which goals are identified and prioritized, but gaining the perspective on behalf of everyone who contributes to create community can be daunting. To aid the village board with this process, a steering committee was selected to identify 60-80 individuals who would be willing to lend their expertise to creating this vision.

MAPPING (Management & Planning Programs Involving Non-Metropolitan Groups) is administered by experts from Western Illinois University of Macomb who have assisted since the program’s inception in 1991. This process has been found to build community support. The participants are selected from a broad cross section of community members who may not reside just within the municipal borders, but have a history of helping build the community. Those in attendance will focus on overcoming current issues and challenges Coal City is facing by creating a step-by-step plan of projects and strategies for achieving large scope goals. Overall, the purpose shall be to promote positive changes to allow Coal City to thrive and continue to be a community that fosters the setting in which current and future generations shall desire to continue to reside and open new businesses.

This type of focus is not new to the village board. Past strategic sessions have led to dramatic changes within the community. Many of the large scale capital projects to include the expansion of the utility operations and the full scale reconstruction of S. Broadway can be attributed to the priorities selected by the previous village boards. During these opportunities, the plan was shared with other community leaders from other governmental entities to gain additional feedback, but a holistic means of gaining the input from the larger community including those who had not previously served or are currently serving in leadership positions is hoped to accumulate additional priorities differing from those prioritized from the existing governmental groups and participants.

It is hard to predict the outcomes from an open process involving participants who have not previously gathered to name the priorities of the community, but MAPPING had repeatedly provided priorities for its participating communities, which has led to attracting additional residents, businesses and development. One part of casting a larger net to gain public opinion will be a rollout of the priority goals that come from this group during a public meeting that is slated for May 21st. Do not be surprised if your neighbor or someone you know asks for your opinion as participants look to allocate their highest priority to 4-5 items in order to map the future of our community.