Orange County NC Website
Browse       Search
Community Values <br />The Zack o a current, comprehensive community values assessment is a gap identified during the <br />research undertaken for this document. To the authors knowledge, discussion of community values for <br />Orange County in Board documents is limited to Commissioners' perceptions of values among county <br />residents, but not a measurement of such. Moreover, the notion of community — as distinct from <br />geographically based terms, such as neighborhood and locality— is a much - debated term. Communities <br />have been defined many ways, including as spatial units that meet sustenance needs, units of patterned <br />social interaction, symbolic units of collective identity, and groups of people that together act politically <br />to bring about change (Minkler & Wallerstein, 2008). <br />Looking for outside sources, the author initially sourced a document published in 2000 titled <br />"Shaping Orange County's Future." In that report, seven categories of values are listed for Orange <br />County: l) sustainable, renewable use resources 2) towns are friendly and accessible, centers of life, 3) <br />rural areas retain natural, visual, and economic resources, 4) excellent education, S) commitment to <br />well -being of all individuals, 6) government that provides necessary services fairly and establishes ties <br />with region and state, and 7) shared sense of community. <br />However, the document is nearly a decade old and the methods with which the process was <br />undertaken, as well as who participated in it, are not clearly delineated. Therefore, the final report was <br />not used as a representative assessment of community values. <br />The author recommends using a third -party to survey Orange County residents about their values <br />regarding the future of the county. Doing so will be informative to indicator, objective, and goal <br />identification as well as strategic plan, since the Board of Commissioners aims to work in a way that <br />aligns with community values. To do so, it will be important to have documentation of those very <br />values. In the interim, examples of types of measures of community values are included in Table 5. <br />W <br />