PARTNERS | HEALTHY CITY  | HOW HEALTHY | VISION | SUMMIT | PRIORITIES | FUNCTIONS | CITY OF FALL RIVER

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 first Commuity Action Plan beginning on May 13, 2004. The results of that review, along with input from the Mayor’s Office, produced the first Action Plan in August, 2004. The process  continued with documentation of the identified Actions in this Plan. 

In March, 2009, a second Summit was held at the Fall River Government Center. Following a series of informational surveys evaluating the outcomes of the first five-year Action Plan ,a second survey and plan was published in December 2009 outlining the Strategic Action Plan for the 2010-2014 period. Updated information on current projects and related activities can be found on this web site.