Partners for a Healthier Community

What is a community
visioning process?

Visioning is the process of developing a shared picture of a healthy community. The vision describes what a community would look like if it were optimally supporting health and well-being for all its residents and organizations. Visioning requires participants to expand their thinking beyond the pressing constraints of today to come up with inspirational and far-reaching ideas for tomorrow.

What is the vision for a Healthier Fall River?

The Mayor’s Office, working with members of Partners for a Healthier Community, invited over 100 community leaders together on February 27, 2003, the first day of the City’s 200th year, at the Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Center for an initial visioning session. From this group, a Design Team was formed to plan the Visioning Process for the City.

Members of the Design Team then conducted over 30 visioning sessions during the summer of 2003, involving over 1,000 people of all ages and yielding hundreds of recommendations for ways of improving the quality of life in Fall River which were then posted on a web site linked to the City’s web site (www.fallriverma.org). In September, 2003, the Design Team organized these recommendations into 42 categories.

The public was then invited to cast three “votes” for what each person considered to be the most important ways of improving the quality of life in Fall River. The categories that received the most votes were then grouped into five Action Priorities. Research conducted by the Healthy Fall River Design Team over the winter of 2003-2004 connected these priority areas with all known existing efforts in the City to address these priorities. These efforts were then summarized and presented at a city-wide Healthy City Fall River Summit held on March 25, 2004 at Bristol Community College to begin to formulate an Action Plan.

An invitation was then issued to the Design Team representatives of the community to review a draft of the Action Plan beginning on May 13, 2004. The results of that review, along with input from the Mayor’s Office, produced the final Action Plan described in this web site. The process will continue with documentation of the identified Actions in this Plan and a preliminary evaluation of the result of these efforts over the first year. Adjustments to this plan will then be made at least annually over the next five years. Activities that address the Action Priorities will added to the Plan as indicated. The impact of each of these activities will be assessed by an ongoing analysis of the data available through a variety of sources and summarized in the description of Leading Health Indicators. Reports to the community will be published periodically.