Ended soon
For the past three years, ISC has been the Learning Network Coordinator for the HUD and EPA-funded, Sustainable Communities Initiative. The Initiative supported the work of 143 urban, suburban and rural places as they developed plans that encompassed environmental, social and economic considerations to make truly sustainable places. From our unique vantage point, ISC has gotten to see communities go through major transformations in how they plan. In the hard work of creating their plans, many of these communities saw substantial – and sometimes unexpected – benefits.
As a closeout to the Initiative, we’ve released Better Plans for Better Places:
How the Sustainable Communities Initiative changed the way the country plans for a prosperous and sustainable future.
The Initiative was unprecedented in how it:
- Used six livability principles to guide grantees’ work.
- Focused on capacity-building.
- Developed new approaches and partnerships by requiring community involvement and cross-sector consortia in the planning process.
- Weaving use of data as essential cornerstone of projects – allowing for new methods of inclusion, transformative insights as well as established baselines and indicators to measure progress.
Our report examines four major themes of the Initiative and spotlights how communities – from Seattle to the New River Valley in Virginia – put those themes and the six livability principles into action.
Read more about Better Plans for Better Places on Next.City.org: Shifting Planning From Pretty Renderings to Affordability and Inclusion, and check out the full report on the Better Plans for Better Places site.