Last week the neighborhood development departments across nine different neighborhoods sat down to flesh out, in the coordinators words, Strategies and Activities regarding how grant money will be distributed in the next fiscal year. There were two other meeting before this one that developed a mission statement and a set of Indicators. The organization describes the four Indicators as categories that the nine neighborhoods want to focus the grant money on. The strategies are areas under the indicators that can be measured using an activity.
To pose this as a landscape architecture example the Indicator is to promote healthy life style choices, the Strategy (one of many) would be having people become conscious of where there food comes from, finally an activity would be to coordinate with a farmers market to distribute information regarding food miles.
Developing the strategies and activities took a day each and while it went alright on the first session it seemed to have fallen apart on the second day. I personally felt that if the sessions were held a week apart then everyone could have had a moment to breathe and reflect. However I still found this whole process really fascinating because throughout school I had read one case study after another- and as I would read through the documents it never occurred to me to think about how the policies that cities neighborhoods and communities follow are created.
