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Client Case Study 4

Community Planning

Client Description

• A small New England community with a history of strong commercial success and recognition of being one of the best communities to visit, live and work. The town, in the decade prior to the engagement, had been recognized as one of the “Best Small Towns in America”, one of the “Most Walkable Small Towns in the U.S.”, and one of the top “Main Streets in America”.

Environment At Point Of Engagement

• The community had been experiencing an economic slow down and been under severe budget pressures to reduce costs and services while keeping tax increases to a minimum. In the weeks and months leading up to the engagement the community had become politically divided on the problems and solutions. The community dialogue had become very heated. Several key leaders in the community reached out to ePartnerships’ founder, Dave Ernsberger and his consulting partner, Art Wilson, the founder of Critical Path Strategies to ask for their help in guiding the community through a discussion to get the town back on a more collaborative and growth oriented path.

Consulting Engagement

• ePartnerships‘ consultants worked with leaders of the Chamber of Commerce, Town and Schools to organize a group of diverse community members committed to the challenges of developing a package of sustainable, deliverable, specific, imperatives that will assure the continuation of the vision of the town being "an ideal place to live, work, play, learn and retire". The consultants delivered a two day planning session to define the key community imperatives and develop a plan for energizing the imperatives. Over a three month period, guided by ePartnership consultants, the community project teams defined initiatives to address the imperatives, develop action plans for implementation and began pilot rollouts for many of the initiatives.

Results

• Within the first 120 days of the Community Project rollout the town is back growing,… commercial business volumes are up, economic development is energized and the leaders of the community are engaged in changing the deliberative processes that inhibited results.