Community Visioning Initiative Clearinghouse

November 18, 2012

Community Visioning Initiatives (CVIs) can be described as a series of community meetings designed to facilitate the process of brainstorming ideas, organizing the ideas into goals, prioritizing the goals, and identifying doable steps.  One of the main goals of Community Visioning Initiatives is to maximize citizen participation in identifying challenges, and in solution-oriented activity.

One very important advantage of the Community Visioning Initiatives kind of approach to collaborative problem solving is that it does not set out a preexisting set of goals—organizers would be believing that “the urgency and awareness that needs to come will come”, and would be focusing more on building a collaborative problem solving approach which people with many different backgrounds and agendas could believe in… could believe will make best use of the knowledge and skills each person has to contribute.

The Community Visioning Initiative approach to collaborative problem solving and citizen peacebuilding (supplemented by many Community Teaching and Learning Centers) emphasizes personal and civic responsibility, maximizing citizen participation in identifying challenges and solution-oriented activity, giving people an opportunity to become actively involved in a solution-charged environment, and minimizing the risk of “transformation unemployment”; and is especially appropriate to the building of “close-knit” communities of people… communities with a healthy appreciation for each others strengths, communities with a well-developed capacity to resolve even the most difficult challenges— and communities which demonstrate a high level of compassion for their fellow human beings.

The CVI Clearinghouse website includes the document “The Potential of Community Visioning Initiatives (in 108 pages)—and a Discussion Forum for the exchange of information, experiences, and resources.

 

 

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