Chattanooga Pulse

A century ago, architect and city planning visionary Daniel Burnham reshaped cities like Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. with a single, simple idea: “Think big.”

Today, in Chattanooga, this sort of big thinking is exactly what Stand is attempting. By the time you read this article, the grand total of 26,263 completed surveys will have been entered by the Center for Applied Research (CASR) and handed over to The Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies for a few months of comprehensive analysis. This is a huge number of surveys. So huge, in fact, that it has made Chattanooga home to the largest survey-based visioning effort in the world. But 26,000-plus is just a number. It’s not really the big part.

I write copy for Stand, and have for six months now. But I am just one tiny part of the sum total.

One of the most interesting things about Stand is the immense number of people who have played instrumental roles in making it work. Stand has an advisory board of a dozen or so, hundreds of volunteers and roundtable planning participants, and more than 26,000 survey respondents. Many of the original staff have since moved on to other jobs or projects across the region and the country. But, in each case, there has been someone else to take the reins with their own vision and vigor. In fact, there is only one current employee of Stand that has been here through it all. And that person is Ashley Leinbach.

What began as a vague research project for her morphed into the title of “data coordinator”, which means that she has been responsible for managing, tracking, and counting every single Stand survey, online and on paper, that has come in, before passing them on to CASR for data entry. This makes her, arguably, the person most intimately connected to the results.

“With such a huge number of surveys collected, an issue that shows up repeatedly is going to demand attention. That being said, I think that some of the most important outcomes of Stand will not be directly tied to the data,” says Leinbach. “I think fostering connectivity and community spirit are some of the biggest things that will come out of Stand.”

Leinbach’s sentiment was echoed consistently as I interviewed Stand board members, volunteers, advocates, and staff in preparation for this piece. But her sentiment is also inherent in the sheer number of connections that have already been made between the many hands that have been a part of molding this massive undertaking thus far.
In the words of Caleb Ludwick, the Stand’s surveying phase was “less about the goal of 25,000 voices than trying to make sure that this one, that one, the other one—every one—had real access to speak freely and be heard. Stand is about creating a platform not for speaking, but for listening. To whom? To everyone—no matter who, what, when, where, why or how. Not a metaphorical ‘everyone,’ but a literal.”

This “everyone” theory is one that we carry with us into the next phase of Stand. Only this time, instead of trying to get everyone to fill out a survey, we’ll be trying to get everyone access to the survey results.  But these results are, by no means, the ultimate answer. Neither are they some magical powder to be sprinkled across the region. And the data’s release is most certainly is not the end of Stand—but merely a starting point. In fact, the gathering of so many survey responses has already begun a process of face-to-face connectivity in our community. What is powerful about the data is its ability to be a conversation starter.

Sally Robinson is the City Councilwoman for District 2, an area that spans from North Chattanooga to Northgate. She describes herself as being involved in Stand just like 26,000 other Chattanoogans have been. When asked about the survey responses, Robinson notes that, “The data isn’t the answer. The data is the beginning. It’s the question. It’s going to take a lot of feet that are already on the ground, a lot of people who are already in office, plus new feet on the ground and new people coming into office to bring about an ambitious transformation.”

Councilman Andrae McGary represents District 8, which covers neighborhoods from Avondale to Clifton Heights. McGary has been an advocate and participant of the campaign since the very beginning, and his outlook echoes that of Councilwoman Robinson. “Ultimately, I don’t think that we know exactly what the data should do,” says McGary. “We have some ideas of what it could do, but I think part of the fun of this is that we really don’t know what’s going to happen. But if you give enough people access to it, then you create the context for them to start talking to each other, which is the next piece. The issues are going to unite us.”

And, as Councilman McGary points out, all theories about the impact of survey results are mere speculation until the Ochs report is completed, which most likely won’t be until the end of 2010’s first quarter.

“There are 26,000 responses, and really we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of responses when you think about every single question, and then multiple responses under each question,” says Lori Quillen, the Ochs Center Policy Analyst who is heading up the research facility’s analysis of the Stand data. “Our job is to be very, very broad, just starting with the 5-7 broadest topics—places, education, economy, etc. And, where possible, we’ll provide statistics from our own research that puts some of these responses in context.”

In preparation for the report becoming available, Stand is evolving its weekly planning meetings into a new initiative called City Share, a bimonthly luncheon series in which Stand brings in community leaders from all over the country (and hopefully the world) via video chat, so that each can share the story of their initiative and their path to leadership with the citizens of our city.

“Learning from other cities is a great way to go,” says Karen Rudolph, a Stand volunteer whose day job is program assistant for the Lyndhurst Foundation. “Finding those cities that are out there and those communities out there that are doing interesting things will only serve to broaden our perspective. Whether we scale it up or we scale it down, it’s all scalable to us.”

The City Share series is possible due to the advent of videoconferencing technology, which makes learning directly from other cities a great deal more feasible. A speaker from hundreds, or even thousands of miles away joins Chattanoogans for a quick 30 minutes of story sharing and Q & A, followed by another 30 minutes of round-table discussion. This means that on every first and third Wednesday of the month, Chattanoogans can sit down together, gain direct inspiration from all over the globe, and then huddle up with fellow citizens to plan out their own strategies for change.

Even before Stand’s weekly roundtable planning meetings transformed into City Share, they have long served as a means to bring together Chattanooga citizens who would otherwise not know each other. For example: At a recent lunchtime planning meeting, I witnessed Katie Waddell, a CreateHere fellow, sit down at a table with the Chattanooga Library Director David Clapp. In talking to one another over sandwiches, they came to discover a mutual love for celluloid—and by the end of their conversation, Waddell was planning to attend a public meeting to discuss the possibility of a Chattanooga film festival.

What this story exemplifies is the simple power of just getting people into a room together. What Stand hopes to create are situations like this one, in which individuals come together to discuss a topic of interest to them (perhaps without even a clear idea of what that topic is when they show up)—and soon, they’ll be able to use the survey data to both strengthen their argument and find others who care about the same thing.

In addition to City Share, a number of evening events focused on civic engagement are scheduled throughout December and January. The first will take place at green|spaces next Thursday, December 10 from 7 – 9 p.m. Stand is teaming up with Elizabeth Crews to present Street Fight, a documentary film about Cory Booker, the progressive community activist who became mayor of Newark, NJ in 2006. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion, in which several local political leaders will talk about their own paths to office.

In the end, Stand’s goal is to empower the citizens of Chattanooga with relevant information and tools to enact change—and then to fade away when it is no longer necessary.

“I believe that Stand at its launch needed to be in the spotlight, to some degree, to encourage participation,” says Caleb Ludwick. “But now is the time for Stand to get out of the way, and start shining that spotlight on others. Stand can be a tireless advocate of everything. Resources can be used to connect others—and then get out of the way.”
It is with this, that I’d like to return to Daniel Burnham, the city planner who reshaped Chicago a hundred years ago:

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”

At the time that he made such a powerful statement about big ideas, Burnham was co-authoring a thoughtful and comprehensive plan to completely rethink his hometown, Chicago—from its architecture to its social structure. Some of the dreams laid out in his Plan for Chicago came to fruition, some didn’t. Either way, Burnham himself was choice-less in how the outcomes were implemented. He presented blueprints to the city in 1909 and died, just three years later, in 1912.

Stand is not going to die after the results of the survey are released, but like Burnham, we will not be the implementers of this idea. It is our job to present information to the public, provide what help we can in building and showcasing new initiatives, and then disappear completely.

Stephen Culp is a local entrepreneur. He is the owner of Smart Furniture, and also a Stand founder and one of our most active board members. This whole, huge thing that has been, and will continue to be, owned by thousands of people in our area, was dreamed up by three people—and Stephen was one of them. He’s been in on it even longer than Ashley Leinbach.

I asked Stephen what his hopes were for the future of Stand. “Stand can help, but ideally more as catalyst than manager or director. Maybe Stand can help till and begin nurturing a ‘fertile field’ of sorts in our community—a place where seeds can land, ideas can spontaneously sprout, and the best ideas can grow and thrive. What you get then is a healthy and diverse entrepreneurial ecosystem. I’d love to see that. I’d love to see hundreds, if not thousands, of citizen-born initiatives. I’d love to see people standing up and helping themselves.”

So maybe we don’t have to wait for our sons and grandsons to do things that would stagger us. Maybe we will watch our neighbors do it.

City Share Schedule

• Join Stand every 1st and 3rd Wednesday from 12-1 pm at CreateHere for light lunch, broad insight, and thoughtful discussion. City Share is free and open to the public.
• December 16:  “Visioning in Real Time”
featuring Russell Stall, executive director of Greenville Forward.
• January 6:  “Collectives and Collaboration”
featuring Justin Langlois, founding member of Broken City Lab.