Editorial
Front Page - Friday, May 7, 2010
Stand survey results are in, but work is far from over
Erica Tuggle
Helen Davis Johnson of Create Here says now that the Stand survey results have been interpreted and are available to anyone for viewing, they want to reconnect with the over 26,000 people who took the survey by pairing citizens with others they may not otherwise talk to in order to make changes to the community together in education, crime and the economy. Stand broke the previous record for the largest community based survey of 19,000 in half the time and with half the price as the former effort Johnson says.
The effort to find out more about the ideas and impressions of Chattanooga citizens through the world’s largest survey-based community visioning effort brought in 26,263 surveys, and over 300,000 responses.
Although the results for the Stand survey are in, the real work of putting these ideas into action is only beginning says Helen Davis Johnson, the co-founder of Create Here, the non-profit that housed the Stand survey project during the collection process.
Now the yellow-shirted Stand team will hit the town to bring the results to events, neighborhood meetings and to all Chattanoogans. Sharing the results will be done in a similar way to show 80 percent of the surveys were collected by hand as the Stand team went door to door, showed up at farmer’s markets and even attended fish-frys to collect surveys.
“When you get that close to it, you feel like you have a responsibility as a group of individuals to take the information that came out of the survey results seriously and see it hit the ground in this region,” Johnson says.
Once the surveys were all collected last September, they were sent to the UTC Center for Applied Social Research where graduate students spent five months typing the answers and assigning a rubric categorization to them. They were then sent to the Ochs Center for Metropolitan studies who went over them with a fine toothcomb and gave the results back in an orderly fashion with explanations to what the information meant.
What they found was five major trends in the data that help provide a picture that the next 25 years in Chattanooga will be about the people and how they address the areas of crime, education and the economy Johnson says.
Stand and Create Here, will use these trends to develop their mission to get the word out by engaging community members on their ideas for the future, organizing around common purposes and translating these visions into action according to their motto.
Johnson says some of the translations of the results of the survey are no surprise. Survey re-spondents agree that Chatta-nooga is a beautiful place and the people are what visitors and residents love about the town. The need for a strong economy was also identified. Eighty percent of all of Chattanooga’s jobs come from small businesses and so, Johnson says, at Create Here they are striving to encourage people to take their innovative ideas and turn them into a small business with the classes and support the organization offers.
She says to begin the process of getting involved, citizens can identify areas that are not being taken care of by anyone in the community and ask themselves how they can take care of this.
The Stand effort was born much longer ago than one would imagine Johnson says. The scolding by Walter Cronkite 25 years ago that Chattanooga had the dirtiest air in the country was what got citizens revved up to make changes and bring the beauty to the waterfront that we see today she says.
“The plans they were making in 1985 for the waterfront were great, but this is also for those who want to get involved with this now,” she says. “We are interested in seeing inner-generational knowledge transfer for those who are young, want to go to work on their community and have a fire in their belly to change things, with those who are older and wiser to help them put these plans into action and navigate the pitfalls.”
Johnson says from the Stand’s efforts she hopes to see the smaller communities within Chattanooga creating their own action and surveys to build upon the data foundation that has been laid. Create Here is also putting together a commitment portfolio to identify how they will respond to the issues addressed and are planning to share these by creating civil engagement and community forums so anyone and everyone can join the conversation Johnson says.
“It’s not just the job of the government, but also for us as individuals to roll up our sleeves and get excited about it. We all want to see our neck of the woods grow and contribute as a community, and although we know our downtown has to be a strong core, let’s stay away from thinking it is the only thing to pay attention to.”
The over 300,000 responses are available in a searchable database, online at http://results. chattanoogastand.com where they can be searched by zip code, gender and age.
“Let’s talk to each other and have productive community conversation,” she says. “I don’t want us to be the kind of area that just points fingers. I want to see us be the area that says I want to hold my neighbors hand and move this issue forward if I don’t like what I see around me.”
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