To build healthy communities, cities and older suburbs must develop solutions to a laundry list of problems: crime, environmental threats, inappropriate development, job loss, business decline, poor housing, and social service gaps.
Isles’ Approach
Isles brings together community members to plan for the
future of their neighborhoods, city and region. With Isles’ support, residents learn how to get organized, address needs
and opportunities, and implement plans to develop land,
support business growth, coordinate services, and strengthen local assets.
Isles’ solutions: At the local level, Isles helps community members to make their neighborhoods safer and plan together for the future. Regionally, Isles works toward more equitable solutions. Isles also promotes excellent research to ensure that its own services, and others, are as effective as they can be.
Isles advises residents and other stakeholders as they talk, think, research and plan for their own futures. Isles helps community planners to:
- Understand local interests, strengths and weaknesses.
- Explore communal opportunities and challenges.
- Build leadership skills by researching and evaluating their physical and social assets and using this information to make decisions.
- Forge coalitions.
- Educate the public, using Isles-developed maps, models, charts and other techniques to teach and engage their peers, as well as government and other funders.
- Research examples from other places.
- Partner with thoughtful designers, architects and development professionals who actively listen and becoming vital partners.
For more information on Isles’ Community Planning & Research department call 609.341.4700 or e-mail info@isles.org.