Stand

Stand is about you—your neighborhood, your community, your city. If you have any questions for us, we want to address them as clearly and helpfully as possible. If you don’t find what you’re looking for here, please contact us.

Visioning is a planning process where a community envisions the future it wants and begins to make it a reality. A community’s vision should reflect its core values, capturing diverse viewpoints, representing a wide variety of interests. Creating a vision requires deep and wide participation from people in all walks of life. Their input will more accurately show what we like about our community and what challenges we face, and their ideas will lead to plans and strategies for improving quality of life for everyone.

26 years ago, Chattanooga reached a crossroads.  Facing economic, environmental and social challenges, a handful of city leaders rallied a few thousand citizens to identify problems and possibilities. Chattanooga Venture’s Vision 2000 process established a legacy of visioning in our community and played a significant role in the remarkable turnaround of Chattanooga’s downtown in the following years.

The community stands at another crossroads.

Downtown, in every neighborhood, across counties, and throughout the region: Stand invites you to help us build on the visioning process that began our community’s transformation 26 years ago. 

You do, along with every newcomer and lifelong resident, city-dweller and suburbanite, activist and skeptic, grandmother and grandchild, executive, housewife and homeless person in our region. Making a difference for the future depends entirely on those who get involved. That’s why we want to give voice to thousands of people and give each voice equal weight. Community change starts with people speaking up, standing up, standing together. It’s that simple and that powerful.

Chattanooga Venture was a not-for-profit organization that created and led Vision 2000, a goal-setting process with more than 1,700 local participants over a 20-week period in 1984. The ideas generated were used to shape 40+ goals for the city to accomplish by the year 2000, supporting citizens’ emphasis on quality of life. Vision 2000 led to more than 200 projects and programs and a community investment of over $800 million from public and private funders.

Building on Vision 2000, ReVision 2000 was initiated in 1993 and drew 2,600 participants, resulting in 27 goals and 122 recommendations for the future.

Stand hopes to build on the model established by these visioning processes, keeping a clear sense of our legacy. Like Vision 2000, Stand asked residents for their input and ideas about the community’s future. We reached more people representing more places than ever before, in the city and in the surrounding region.

It all started with a simple survey to be completed by every person in the Chattanooga region. Collecting over 26,000 responses in just five months, Stand is the world’s largest community visioning survey! Stand hopes to equip and empower groups of individuals, businesses and communities to work together to be part of and proud of our home.

The Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies and the Center for Applied Social Research at UTC processed the surveys. Additionally, the Ochs Center prepared an executive summary of the results and relevant statistics, and it was made public in April 2010. Stand also released all the data, scrubbed of identifying information, in a searchable database available to the public.

The input from thousands of community members identified common themes, challenges and ideas. As a community, we can identify shared priorities through public dialogue, build stronger connections between residents, leaders and organizations, and collaborate to turn vision into action.

Really, you are. A community’s visioning process has a real, lasting impact when citizens decide what they want for the future, and then do something about it. 

A growing and diverse group of people and organizations are partnering to collectively imagine what is possible for our future. While Stand is planned and driven by community members, a movement of this scale has associated costs. CreateHere has a continued interest in Chattanooga’s future, and has provided physical space, people power and organizational resources for this project. Core support is generously provided by the Benwood Foundation, the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga and the Lyndhurst Foundation. Visit the About page to see a list of people and organizations standing up to support and endorse Stand.

You and your friends and neighbors. You and people like you. You and people totally different from you who don’t know you, but want the same things as you. Stand’s goal is not to make sure that “somebody does something about it.” Instead, we want residents across the region to share an understanding of what needs to be done and a sense of responsibility for making it happen.

The door is alway open for anyone committed to being hopeful and helpful.

Yes, every response was read by a person, not a computer. The work was done by smart, thorough and dedicated individuals.

The Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies, along with UTC’s Center for Applied Social Research, handled the data entry, coding and analysis.

If you filled out a survey, it made its way back to Stand HQ and was stamped with a unique number. When surveys came back in bundles, such as from events, house parties or location-specific canvassing, we noted the source and date they were collected, too.

Each week, we took all collected paper surveys to The Ochs Center/Center for Applied Social Research. There, four experienced student researchers input the data digitally, exactly as it came in, to a form similar to the online survey. Near the half-way point, they conducted a data verification check on 5% of their data set. In other words - they selected digitally entered surveys at random and made sure the data matched what was on the original paper survey.

Ochs and CASR also worked together to develop a qualitative coding rubric with broad categories and more specific sub-categories, based on themes they saw emerging as the data was entered. Once this rubric was approved, the student researchers assigned codes to survey responses that came in on paper and online. Once they were about halfway through, people who hadn’t handled the data conducted a mid-point coding verification check on 5% of responses, to see if the codes assigned to the responses correctly matched the rubric.

Once all the data was coded, The Ochs Center analyzed it and produced an executive summary, which includes breakdowns of the data according to major themes, geographic location, demographics, etc. Stand’s goal was to return all this valuable information back to you in a format that’s easy to use, share and understand. Along with the executive summary, ALL the survey data was be shared openly with the public, after removing personal information, of course. So, if you want to know what people in your ZIP code had to say, you can sort and search at will.

The results were released to the community at large through public forums, the Internet, news & media outlets, word of mouth and non-traditional, creative means.

The future of the Chattanooga region is up to us—to those who speak up and stand up to start working for tomorrow, today. This is your home, and it’s ours, too. If we work together, there’s no end to what we can accomplish. Let’s redefine leadership and let’s be citizens, not just residents.