It’s National Community Planning Month and we continue to celebrate the community planners that help make our regions vibrant!

These professionals help communities grow and thrive while maintaining the area’s history and culture.

Questions they often ask as they’re working to help a community (borrowed from the Planners Network) include:

• Historically, how has cultural activity helped sustain this community?
• How do we value and respond to the history of a place while designing ways to improve it for its present and future uses?
• How can we have new development in communities and not discard the existing programs that have organically created the existing community?
• How can the process of change include all stakeholders at the table for planning?
• What are the incentives for mutually beneficial relationships among arts, culture, community, and the variables of commercial development?
• What are the resources, financial and human, that community-based cultural organizations need to affect sustained and stabilizing community development?
• What do we do when things don’t work out, despite truly good faith efforts, to reduce tensions, repair relationships, and carry lessons forward?

Find out how community planning is happening in your area! Talk to your town or city officials and learn the details of any plans in the works.