Agenda - 08-20-1997 - 8c - Laserfiche WebLink

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5 Shaping Orange County's Future: Youth Visioning Effort The Shaping Orange County's Future project is striving to create and realize a vision for the future of the county through citizen participation and community building. It is the purpose of this grant application to reach the youth in the county so that the Shaping Orange County's Future initiative may benefit from their ideas while instilling the importance of participation and community building in the youth for a lifetime. Orange County recognizes the need for planning towards a common goal in the face of the growth pressures that the Triangle area and, specifically, Orange County will be feeling in the future. A joint initiative between Orange County and the towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro (in coordination with the town of Hillsborough), has been created entitled Shaping Orange County's Future. As a result, a Task Force of 30 citizens representing diverse geography, livelihoods, ages and ethnic backgrounds, was appointed from a long list of applicants.- This diversity of + membership was designed to give voice to the broad scope of community in the county. The Task Force, have been charged with going into our larger community and seeking out all stakeholders to take part in this initiative by contributing their vision for the future of Orange County. Participation from the widest possible range of county citizens is a necessary component for achieving Shaping Orange County's Future's goal -- to develop a countywide vision for the future through community participation and implement that vision through community building. Special outreach efforts are needed to provide the county's youth an opportunity to voice their ideas in the planning and community building process. A small pilot project enabling county 5th graders to learn about planning and visioning will be launched in the fall of 1997. Like the Youth Visioning Effort, the fifth graders will have an opportunity to share their hopes and fears of the future of Orange County which will be incorporated in the Shaping Orange County's Future process. However, while able to provide funding for materials needed for the elementary age outreach and staff development time for the planning and implementation for a larger Youth Visioning Effort, Shaping Orange County's Future cannot conduct an effective education and involvement program for a wider span of area youth age groups without funding assistance for educational and documentation materials, youth transportation, consensus training facilitation, planning based technology enrichment for area schools, and a day-long charette. (Please refer to the enclosed budget for itemization.) Receiving funds from the Triangle Community Foundation would enable the expansion of our Youth Visioning Effort to include middle and high school age students in the visioning and community building process for Orange County. In February and March 1998 the Shaping Orange County's Future Task Force hopes to involve five 7th grade and five 11 th grade classes located throughout the county in the visioning and community building process. With the help of professional planners and Masters students from the University of North Carolina(UNC), the Task Force hopes to meet with approximately 300 students, provide enrichment exercises for the classroom such as a visual survey of the county, and culminate the learning and sharing process in a design charette. These efforts will lead to the ^ter.._.,.•.-.