Looking Ahead to Our Community’s Vision for 2015

This is it, the last day of 2014. Now will begin the many articles and countdowns of the most popular songs, best places to travel, top movies, and a variety of other “best of” lists from 2014. I’ll focus on the city’s 2014 “top” list next week, but this week I want to look forward to 2015.

As we look ahead, many of us anticipate and imagine what will happen in 2015. Some set personal or business goals to achieve and others make resolutions in order to change something about themselves to be different a year from now.

The process many of us go through is visioning. We step back, evaluated where we are currently, determine the trend we’re moving in, and compare that with where we want to be. The hard part is figuring out how to get our business, finances, or ourselves to where we want them to be in a year’s time.

Just like with your personal fitness or finances, towns and cities must also go through this same process to be successful and achieve their goals.

Creating a vision on a city level is much more complex than a personal New Year’s resolution. It involves our appointed officials, our elected officials, and, most importantly, you, our citizens! Our goal is to create a community that you desire to live in.

A community vision brings everyone together and makes sure everyone is moving in the same direction, all striving to reach the same goals and vision. A community vision opens the doors to new ideas of what our community could be and can bring innovative solutions to our city's current problems. A community vision can create new, unknown partnerships between groups, both public and private in order to reach the shared vision. A community visions lays out a specific strategy with goals that can easily be followed and tracked.

These benefits help to create a successful community that you want to live in. Just like your personal goals, there will be hard times, difficult times, and times that you want to just give up, but pushing through and sticking with the vision will get us to the city everyone desires to have.

Creating your vision for the future of Elizabethton isn’t hard. Take a moment right now, imagine yourself holding the Elizabethton Star on December, 31st 2015. Looking at the front page, what do you believe three of those headlines should say? Jot those three headlines down and mail, email, or tell your elected and appointed officials in the city and the county what you think those three headlines should be! Our goal is to make those headlines realities. Let’s talk about it!