What will Springfield look like 25 years from now? That’s the goal of Springfield 2051, a project that uses input from the community to try to answer that question.
Heading the effort is the research and consulting firm Future IQ. CEO David Beurle tells us about how the project is going so far.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
David Beurle: Well I think it's going great. We've had about nine months of really strong community engagement, and we've had over 2,000 people weigh in on what they see for the future of Springfield. It's been this really fascinating discussion where we've been asking people about what direction they want the community to go, what's their appetite for change, what do they think of the big focus areas going forward.
Mike Frazier: Have you done community surveys to find out what the residents of Springfield are looking for?
Beurle: Yeah, so the community engagement has been a really important focus of this. The steering committee has been really strong on wanting to make sure that this great outreach and that people who are stakeholders in the future get a chance to weigh in on it.
So we've had both in-person and virtual surveys. We had over fifteen hundred responses to the survey. And these are really high quality data points. I mean, that survey was about 15 or 20 minutes to complete. It was qualitative, quantitative responses, so open-ended and numeric responses. And we know a lot about those people in terms of which neighborhood they live in, what's their age profile and so on. It's really rich data that tells us a lot of what people are thinking and their sentiment for change and sentiment about the future.
But we've also had about 800 people attend in-person sessions. We've had over 50 what we call listening sessions where we went around to high schools and neighborhoods and businesses and different organizations and had these hour or two hour long sessions where we got people to weigh in on a number of key questions. So this has been a really strong community outreach and engagement exercise.
What we started to see is there's actually a very large portion of the community that is pretty excited about what they see happening. And they've got a high level of satisfaction about living in the community. And they feel pretty good about how the community is starting to come together. And this became really the dominant component of the survey responses. And the sort of things that people talked about is that they saw the action in downtown. They saw the revitalization that's occurring there. They're really excited about that. But they also saw very intentional efforts to start to bring the community together around important topics.
Frazier: What phase in the Springfield 2051 campaign are you in now and what's next?
Beurle: The next big phase in the project, which will run for six months or so, is starting to say, well, if we've identified what we think our vision is and what the key building blocks of that vision are, what are the actions we need to be taking over the next one, two, five, ten years, that will pivot our trajectory towards that preferred future? So we're gonna go back out to the community for another several months, and seek input from people about what ideas they've got for action areas. We'll gather those and then do some prioritization of those with the community. And then that'll lay down the basis of this roadmap. Think of it as a master plan that the community has crafted itself about here's where we wanna go, Here's what we think we need to work on to get there. And here's who's going to lead those initiatives.
Frazier: I was about to ask you if the community still has an opportunity for input and it sounds like there are more opportunities coming up.
Beurle: Oh, absolutely. And that's part of that commitment to broad community engagement. We want the community to feel like they own this at every step.
Frazier: What did the Haitian community tell you, or how involved were they in community input regarding Springfield 2051?
Beurle: There are a number of people who are on the steering committee who do have very deep outreach into that community, people who were from the faith community and so on. They sit on our advisory group and they bring a lot of that information. So part of what we've tried to do is to structure the advisory group in the steering committee. It reaches into all these networks in the community. And while some of those networks, the people individually may feel reluctant to participate, we are certainly getting their perspective coming into the process. But I think that's just good, organic, community building, community fabric work. So we feel confident that we have an understanding of the issues that are on people's minds.
Frazier: For people who may be looking for a place to live or to work or to move their business into, when they say, “Why Springfield,” what would you tell them?
Beurle: People do see Springfield being a uniquely different community. And it has a very distinct flavor. And I think part of that is driven by history. Springfield has had its ups and downs over time, but it has been an incredibly significant center for industry and commerce and innovation in this country in its lifetime.
But the other part, too, that people have talked about is that Springfield is this perfect size. It’s big enough to have a lot of amenities like great hospitals and things like that, but it's also small enough where you can make a home for yourself and you can connect into the system and make a difference.
