José
E. Martínez LLC
Organizational Management | Community Development Consultants
Project & Program Management | Strategic Planning | Facilitation
[GS-10F-0154S] An
SBA 8(a) firm
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This site was developed and is maintaned by José E. Martínez This
site is viewed best with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Updated on: November 21, 2006 |
| What
is Community Development?
All communities, large and small, are complex systems. They need solutions to their constantly changing complex and often urgent needs. Community Development is a discipline that incorporates elements from many professional disciplines to find solutions to a community's dilemmas. Community development professionals address those needs by providing the community the opportunity to step back and see the overall issue, and thereby better understand the situation. We achieve this by bringing together various professional disciplines as may be required to identify issues. With the community's involvement, together we generate innovative strategies addressing those issues. A fully representative and active body of citizens should influence public decisions, because an informed and involved community is a healthy community with a future. Decisions made without the involvement of citizens are doomed from the start. We approach community development by first identifying the community's public leadership. With the leadership's support, we facilitate discussions yielding answers to questions such as, Do we need to plan, and how can we prevent this from reoccurring? Typically, the answers are a resounding Yes! and Let's roll up our sleeves and plan for the future! We guide the community in identifying its issues - its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. An important note on our approach to assisting communities through a strategic planning process is that we do not want to have to return to that community for subsequent consulting roles. That's right. Small communities cannot afford recurring consulting contracts for the same issues. So, our approach is to teach the community's leadership how to perform the strategic planning process without outside consultants. This said, we do not recommend fly-by-night strategic planning processes by consultants that promise to do a community's strategic planning process in a week-end or a week. A community's future is in its own people; its own leaders must be empowered to lead the subsequent strategic planning processes. A community's future is long-term, and cannot be conceived in a week-end or even a week. Taking these steps, an active and representative community will better understand how it got into the problematic situation in the first place. The representative group can assist its leadership to understand the economic, physical, social, environmental, and psychological reasons for their dilemma. Having gotten this far, the group of citizens ranks the issues yielding the strategic issues for which it develops implementation strategies. Dovetailing these strategic issues and implementation strategies is the Strategic Plan to carry out the vision for their community. At this point, the group realizes that only the community itself can carry out the Plan. Because the group now understands the strategic planning process, it is now empowered to replicate it for large or small issues that will undoubtedly confront the community. The group now possesses community capacity building, problem solving and the required community focus for action. These processes yield an equally important by product. Because social, economic, ethnic, and cultural groups are involved in the planning process, communications between them is enhanced. There is now improved cooperation between them because they now understand that they all have a common goal- their community's vitality. |
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