The city of Springfield won’t celebrate its 250th birthday until 2051. But local leaders are already asking what the city could look like then.
They’ve just launched Springfield 2051 — a 15-month, community-building process they say will result in “a bold, new roadmap for the future of Springfield and Clark County.”
Two sessions will be held this month to gather community input for the plan.
The first will be 8:30 a.m. to noon Friday, Sept. 19, and will discuss macro trends. The second will be 8:30 a.m. to noon Friday, Sept. 26, and will focus on scenarios and a preferred future.
Both will be at the Hollenbeck Bayley Creative Arts and Conference Center, 275 S. Limestone St. To sign up for a session, go to springfield2051.com/think-tank.
WYSO’s Evelyn Huspen spoke with Marta Wojcik, executive director of the Westcott House and a member of the Springfield 2051 Steering committee, and David Beurle, the CEO and Founder of Future IQ — a data and research firm.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
David Beurle: And so the planning for this really sort of started toward the end of last year when Marta and others were starting to come together and talk about this very issue of the trajectory of the community and the narrative about the community, its reputation and what it wants to evolve into. And I engaged with Marta, and the team toward the end of last year and we kind of worked through different options, and I was really just providing advice because our company does a lot of work with communities around this country and other parts of the world as they kind wrestle with their future. And then I think what we started to really understand was that this was a really unique opportunity.
You know, there's a set of really interesting circumstances here, and I think we really got excited about the idea of working together to be able to sort of bring in a lot of kind of like resources and sort of methodology to help have a big conversation that reaches literally thousands of people, but be able to bring that sort of information together and data together in a really sharp vision and aspiration for the future and then build this roadmap. And that obviously takes, in this case, we've mapped out a 15, 16 month process. So we've really started working into this in the last few months.
Evelyn Huspen: Can you tell me more about the steering committee? Who are they and what role do they play?
Marta Wojcik: That was one of the really important characteristics of this project from the beginning, that this is not driven by one agency. It's a group of people who deeply care about community, but they can bring different points of view, different expertise to guide this project. Anyone from a director of a philanthropic foundation in town to county commissioner, to city manager, to a historian, to physician, to director of community engagement for the community foundation, it's just an amazing group of people that I'm actually, I'm amazed that they were willing to step in and get pretty intensive work over the next 15 months. And it's just, it takes all these points of views and business community. And I mean, it's just, really, that variety that I think will help us to steer this project and get the results we need.
Evelyn Huspen: You have a section on your website called Think Tank, where you guys are having, I saw a couple meetings in September.
David Beurle: Yeah, so through the course of this project, we have a number of really defined steps in the conversation and we have sort of a desire to both have wide engagement and deep thinking. And you can't do wide engagement and deep thinking with everybody, right? So we are providing lots of opportunity for people to kind of weigh in on surveys or attend listening sessions or workshops and so on. But we also need to dedicate the parts of the process to think very deeply about the future. And so the Think Tank is one of those steps in the process. We're holding it over two Fridays, consecutive Fridays, so we're calling them Future Fridays, so the launch is on Friday, the think tank's on Friday. It's in two parts. So the first part is a deep dive into looking at the trends and the sort of situational analysis of the Springfield area at the moment, and identifying what people sort of see as the key drivers shaping the future.
I'm really trying to understand those in terms of the ones that are creating opportunity, the ones that are creating challenge, but are pushing the community in different directions. We'll do some work with the data we get from that, and then the second Friday, we're going to build out these different versions of the future. So we'll build out four different plausible scenarios. So based on that work on the trend lines and the drivers shaping the future, and the assessment of those by the participants, we're going to use that to build this framework, which will give us four possible, sort of plausible, well within the scope of reality futures and play those out and think about implications over five, 10, 15, 20 years. It's a really powerful process because it gives us a way to think about choice for people that if we can sort of articulate what these different plausible scenarios might be and what they might look like, then you can look at that and go, "Oh yeah, I love that one," or "That one there, that's got too many unintended consequences." Or there's maybe too much risk in that, or that one there doesn't fit my values and so on. But it gives us a framework to present to the community so people can respond and kind of weigh in on the notion of choice. So The Think Tank is really doing the deep thinking that we're then going to take out to the community and get them to react to and respond to.
