• Who we are
• Full description on the project (PDF file)
• Full-text documents by and about the project

Beginning in the Spring of 1999, we spent a year convening our countywide community to find out what people think would make Kalamazoo County more livable, sustainable, and economically viable. We heard from over 3400 households through our random survey, talked to about 200 people in 30 focus groups, invited community members to help us make sense of the information, and held a countywide convention where people generated strategies for moving our county in the directions our citizens want it to go.

Here's what we heard people throughout the county saying about their hopes for the County's future:

• We want to preserve our farmlands and open spaces. (See Land Use)
• We want our children to be able to go to high quality public schools. (See K-12 Education)
• We want Kalamazoo County to be a community that nurtures new businesses and where new businesses want to settle and stay. (See Economic Development)
• We want the leaders of our governments, businesses and educational institutions to work together. (See Collaboration)
• We want to see ourselves as a countywide community with a common destiny. (See Thinking Regionally)
• We want our citizens to actively participate in the decisions our leaders make about our County's future, and we want our leaders to listen. (See Citizen Participation)

We hope that people at both the leadership and grassroots levels will use the information on these pages to more effectively push for actions that will help move the County in directions that our citizens so clearly hope it will go. (See Strategies for Effective Action.)

Data Sources

Focus Groups: During the summer and fall of '99 we conducted 15 focus groups with a broad range of interest groups including historic preservationists, home builders, a village VFW chapter, farmers, environmentalists, city & township officials, youth, retirees, & realtors. The conversations were taped and transcribed word-for-word, although names were changed in order to maintain confidentiality. We asked groups to talk about their hopes & concerns for the county, and allowed the conversation to go in whatever direction the participants wanted to take it. During the spring of 2000, we conducted an additional 14 focus groups with rural and suburban residents throughout Kalamazoo County. We analyzed the focus group transcriptions using a qualitative data analysis software program. (Detailed description in PDF format.)

Random & Non-Random Surveys: Informed by our initial focus groups, we created a survey to gather more detailed and quantitative information about Kalamazoo County residents' values, hopes and concerns about the future of the region. This random survey generated data from over 3200 households. In addition, we published the same survey in the Gazette and received over 900 completed surveys. (Because the responses to the Gazette survey were self-selected and non-random, these data were kept separate from the data generated by the random survey administered by WMU's Kercher Center.) The data included here are all from the random survey.

Resource Teams: During the winter of 2000, in an effort to maximize citizen involvement in the Convening Our Community process, we formed "Resource Teams" to diversify the perspectives from which our data could be viewed. Using mailing lists from environmental, service, and leadership organizations, along with those that our focus group process generated, we invited over 1000 county citizens to come to a meeting at which we shared our preliminary results. Then we invited them to form "Resource Teams" to sift through the data, add their own expertise, and reach deeper understandings of the issues we face together. Over 100 people took part in this process, in which we asked them to come up with "Declarations" concerning Land Use, Economic Development, Inter-Governmental Cooperation, and Community Excellence (downtown revitalization, race relations, civic and cultural life, etc.). These "Declarations" take a position on each of these key issues and suggest how we may approach them. Central to the Declarations are "We Stand For" statements, which are statements about the desired future of Kalamazoo County that the resource teams agreed upon. Important in this process was the diversity of people on each team - for example, the land use team included environmentalists, builders and Realtors, all of whom had to work together to come up with the Declaration statement.

Community Convention: The "We Stand For" statements from the Declarations written by the Resource Teams provided the starting point for our Greater Kalamazoo Community Convention in the spring. We invited any member of the Kalamazoo County community to attend this community-wide convention, with the goal of revising and ratifying the Declaration and, thereby, setting an agenda for the community's future. We also asked participants to devise and agree upon strategies we could pursue to begin to make that desired future a reality. The information from the convention that we found most significant was a) the "We Stand For" statements for which there was 100% agreement by convention participants, and b) the citizen-generated strategies that were broadly supported by convention participants.