Program Highlight - Charting the Future of Our Community

“We should be able to do something like that in Clearfield,” he figured. So he pulled together a group of about 50 people, including bankers, leaders of large institutions and government, the mayor, council members, township supervisors, the school superintendent and the director of a local university campus.

Declaring himself a “lifer here,” Walker, president and CEO of Bradford Energy Co., says he remembers the boom times. His dad, now aged 97, often spoke of how dynamic the community once was.

But decades had not been kind to Clearfield, which he says “had lost community leadership and vision.” Not willing to let it go, Walker thought, “If we could come up with a shared vision, we could make a big difference.”

That’s when Bill Shuffstall, a Cooperative Extension educator with Penn State’s Community and Economic Development, entered the picture, bringing with him a strategic visioning program called “Charting the Future of Our Community.”

He says Penn State’s program is an outgrowth of many programs he’s used over the years and is a good fit for a wide variety of organizations, from Chambers of Commerce to private schools.

Evidence of the program’s versatility can be found miles and years apart from Clearfield, in Mercer County where Frasier Zahniser and a Mercer County group are celebrating the beginning of the seventh year of Our Children, Our Future.

With a fresh grant in hand from the state’s Office of Child Development and Early Learning, she wrote, “I am extremely proud of the efforts each of you has made to create opportunities for young children to have high quality early learning experiences.

“As we begin this new grant year you have an opportunity to renew your commitment to the Action Team you have been supporting or change to a team that more closely aligns with your current interests,” she said, highlighting the fact that the teams that direct the effort are fluid and responsive to the needs of the moment, that they have changed and grown with the times.

“As the Our Children, Our Future initiative has evolved our vision remains the same, however, our goals have been streamlined into 3 Action Teams,” Zahniser wrote in a letter.

The process of putting the teams together dates back to 2002, when Zahniser, an extension educator based in Mercer County, went through training for Charting the Future of Our Community. Initially, six teams--child care, school readiness, awareness participation, community partnerships, economic and sustainability—were formed.

Before long, the group received a grant to support the work and, as it turned out fortunately, the terms were vague enough to allow flexibility. Over time, the grant became more specific, but the specifics turned out to be in line with the program’s established goals of making sure children are ready for kindergarten and raising the awareness of the public to support the effort.

As the program matured, the teams refined down to three—school readiness, child care and early childhood outreach (formerly awareness participation).

Zahniser says, “I can see, looking back, how using that Charting (the Future of Our Community) process put us on a solid foundation.”

It meant a lot of work for a lot of people, particularly the six months of preparation before any real work began.

It was an election year for county commissioners, so all the candidates where among the dozens who participated. Three of them were elected, one of whom eventually moved up to the state legislature, which meant they had a stake in the program that deals with children from birth through age 8.

Shuffstall says a community benefits if a very diverse group comes together to form a vision for the community and agree on how different organizations fit into the bigger picture. “We don’t live in isolation as individuals.”

Penn State’s Charting program traces its beginnings to a similar one operated by the Illinois Institute of Rural Affairs that seemed to fit the needs of a Pennsylvania group. After some agreements with Illinois and fine tuning to fit Pennsylvania’s municipal structures, the Charting program was ready for rollout.

“To do an effective Charting program takes a lot of time up front,” Shuffstall says. “It only works if you have stakeholders.”

It takes a lot of planning and a lot of participation, he says. The outcome is intended to be a shared vision of the community by the people involved. Once the vision is drafted, there’s plenty to talk about, including trends in the community, what’s changing, what’s going on outside the community that has an impact and who has legal authority or power to do something.

After a lot of discussion and studying, Shuffstall says, “You come out with communitywide goals.” That’s followed by deciding what the steps are to accomplishing the goals, the order in which they need to be done and who needs to come to the table from inside and outside the community.

The program consists of 15 hours of training, he says. And he sternly warns potential participants that they can’t short-circuit the process. “What you want to do is going to take a lot of sweat equity on your part.”

Walker says Shuffstall brought an outside perspective to the group, which eventually put together a white paper and came up with a shared vision for the future of Clearfield Borough and the six townships that make up the local school district. The group is happy to do the groundwork, then turn it all over to another for completion.

Already they are set to become a Main Street Community under the state Department of Community and Economic Development and have received several grants for repairs or studies at their park; fire company, police department and municipal mergers, and other community issues. They’ve initiated water and sewer projects and set up numerous community foundations.

Under the moniker Vision 2020, the Clearfield group plans to build townhouses along the West Branch of the Susquehanna River that runs through the borough, are collecting funds for a new YMCA, envision a new parking garage in town and have invited county government to bring more of its offices downtown.

Walker, whose only title with the group is interested community leader, says his mantra is “If you can dream it, you can do it,” and follows that up by saying, “We have the vision laid out.”

That said, one can’t help believing him when he says life in the townhouses will be much more affordable with geothermal heat from alongside the river and that old steam lines underneath the streets can become part of the revitalization.

“We feel that Clearfield is one of the communities in Central Pennsylvania that has the ability to reinvent itself,” Walker says. “Bill (Shuffstall) was very helpful to us.”

by Linda Hudkins

Originally published September 2008