County Steering Committees Begin Year-Long Strategic Planning Process

As part of Barren River Area Development Districts 5-year update to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS) and Multi-Hazard Multi-Jurisdiction Mitigation Plan (HMP), county-level Steering Committees were convened in January of 2021, calling together the County Judge-Executive, Mayors of each incorporated city within each county, representatives from education, healthcare, emergency management, financial institutions, tourism commissions, and other interested stakeholders.

To kick off the planning effort, Local Steering Committees met over Zoom and established the expectations/set the vision for the planning effort. In an effort to reduce COVID-19 impacts on the overall process, Steering Committees continued to meet by Zoom for an hour each month from January to July, switching to in-person meetings from July-December.

Led by BRADD staff, each Steering Committee worked their way through the Community Development Council’s Strategic Planning Process (pictured below) in order to create a county-level strategic plan that then funnels up into the two regional plans (CEDS & HMP).

During the initial hour-long meeting with each Steering Committee, BRADD Staff also reviewed the expected time commitment from each committee member (typically no more than 3 hours per month: 1 hour in-meeting, 1 hour reviewing meeting materials, and 1 hour conducting outreach/sharing meeting info to those in their social circles). Each Steering Committee also made use of a custom Google Classroom set up for committee members to share information and review any meeting materials for meetings they could not attend.

Steering Committees also learned more about what it means to be a resilient community and identified existing planning efforts, current local successes, and potential future successes for the County and each City within the County.

From a resilient community standpoint, BRADD staff asked Steering Committee members to imagine holding a stress ball in one hand and a ball of clay in the other. As you squeeze both hands, you are simulating outside stressors impacting your community. These could be things like natural disasters (severe storms, flooding, tornadoes, etc.), economic impacts (e.g. loss of major employers), or even local capacity impacts (lack of adequate community paid staff such as paid firefighters or a full-time mayor). In a resilient community, you are much more like the hand holding the stress ball. Your community ‘bounces back’ from the outside stressors, and, in most cases, is able to carry on without negative long-term impact. In the other hand, the clay represent the non-resilient community. Outside stressors greatly impact the community’s shape and they may never full ‘bounce-back’ from the impact. By working through this year-long planning process, BRADD is hoping to move each of our communities toward resiliency.

To give an initial starting point for each community to build off of, Steering Committees were asked to identify any existing planning efforts, current local successes, and potential future successes. This discussion and identification took the place of a traditional SWOT analysis for each community, and kept the discussion more positively focused overall.

By asking members to identify any existing planning efforts, BRADD staff was able to pull in those efforts to this planning process in order to keep from duplicating/reinventing the wheel. This also allowed Steering Committee Members to re-evaluate any existing goals/objectives for their community in light of COVID-19 impacts as many of the existing planning initiatives were completed prior to 2020.

Finally, Steering Committee members tackled identifying current and future community successes. Community Successes are achievements created by a portion of the community, using primarily community resources, and appreciated by others in the community. To create this listing BRADD Staff asked each committee: What is something about your city/county that you are proud of? What’s working in your community right now? What are some examples of times when the community has come-together to achieve something? When identifying possible future successes, BRADD Staff asked each committee: What is something about your city/county that you want to be proud of in 5 years? Where is there an opportunity for us to create a success/meet a need in the community?

BRADD compiled the information gathered during this first meeting and used that to build the foundation for each County Strategic Plan in each of the succeeding monthly meetings. To read more about information covered in other monthly meetings, click here.