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Envisioning Hamilton’s future Seeking Public Input

NRU
Sept. 23, 2015
Leah Wong

After a summer of rallying public interest, City of Hamilton staff is working with residents to develop a community vision that will guide decision-making for the next 25 years.

Known as Our Future Hamilton, the initiative seeks to update the city’s first community vision called Vision 2020. Created in 1992, Vision 2020 helped to guide the city’s decision making and strategic planning process.

“[Vision 2020] is coming to the end of its lifespan and the city manager’s office recognized we needed to update the vision,” neighbourhood and community initiatives director Suzanne Brown told general committee last week. “[In the update] we wanted to be thoughtful about the way that we engaged residents.”

To guide the process, council adopted a public engagement charter created with the help of the Hamilton Engagement Committee in March. (See April 1 edition of NRU.) Work on Our Future Hamilton will conclude into early spring 2016 when work on the new strategic plan is scheduled to begin.

Community initiatives manager John Ariyo told committee that staff have constantly been trying to determine how best to engage residents. The primary strategy, so far, has been to target people as they are out and about in the community—with staff frequenting festivals, shopping malls and sports facilities.

In the first phase, completed between April and mid- August, the city engaged almost 24,000 residents on a new vision. The goal is to engage 50,000 by the time the initiative ends in spring 2016.

Brown said staff has also engaged the city’s key anchor institutions, which will use the input collected through the visioning process to guide their own priorities.

“For the first time the City of Hamilton along with key stakeholders will start to align their priorities and we will start to move in the same direction.”

Heading into the second phase of the initiative, staff is seeking to further refi ne input from the community to inform a draft community vision framework that will be presented to the public in December.

Meanwhile, staff is working to close the gaps and find ways to engage groups that traditionally are left out of the process—particularly small businesses, people with disabilities, communities outside of the core and youth.

Ward 6 councillor Tom Jackson suggested to committee that there is an opportunity to use this process to engage the city’s youth. While the city has a youth advisory committee Jackson said it has struggled to have the necessary membership to hold meetings.

Brown said staff have been working to specifically target youth engagement in its neighbourhood work and have been asking youth how they want to be engaged. What they’ve found is that formalized structures preferred by adults are not as popular with youth.

“Youth like to be engaged over something concrete. A committee may be less appealing than coming in and talking about a specific issue.”

Councillor Matthew Green suggested that while he’s noticed staff’s presence in the community he feels the process has, so far, missed an opportunity to leverage social media to reach a wider range of residents.

Seven draft directions guide the visioning engagement process: