The results of the what its organizers call the world's largest community visioning survey will be released next week, highlighting what Chattanoogans want as a new decade begins.
Stand, an initiative by CreateHere to collect opinions from Chattanooga area residents about the city's future, got responses from 26,263 people asked to identify what they want for their community in a four-question survey. The response tops the next largest such campaign in Alberta, Canada - ImagineCalgary - which collected just a little more than 18,000 responses.
"We will have over 300,000 responses from our surveys to help us identify values and needs to make this a better place to live," said Katherine Nielsen, the Stand campaign coordinator. ""We want people to be able to draw from this regional data as well as very specific information from their neighbors to help guide where we go in the future."
Stand is an updated and expanded version of what Chattanooga Venture conducted in 1984 with its Vision 2000 program. The ideas from Vision 2000 encouraged Chattanooga to build the Tennessee Aquarium and upgrade the downtown riverfront, among other programs.
The Stand survey results suggest that many Chattanoogans now are interested in investments in people, not just places. Three key issues identified by respondents are education, crime and jobs, according to Stand officials.
"Twenty-five years ago, a group of Chattanooga visionaries began a process that transformed the place we live in," said Stephen Culp, the president of SmartFurniture and one of the organizers of the Stand campaign. "Twenty five years later, Stand has become more about the people that live in that place."
Stand officials will release the results on April 12. The data was compiled by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Center for Applied Social Research and analyzed by the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies.
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Find out more about Stand and community visioning at www.chattanoogastand.org.
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