NS Planning - Triangle Community Foundation Grant Application - Shaping Orange County's Future

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6 incorporation of student vision and creativity into the product of Shaping Orange County's Future. The students will be given an opportunity to provide direct input to Orange County's vision through a variety of means. Students will be taught a variety of basic planning concepts through interactive educational presentations, design exercises, a cooperative countywide field survey held in conjuction with other schools, hands-on planning technology experience, and consensus building facilitation. These meetings and events will be documented by video and tape cassette. Following the initial in-class visits, a curriculum designed to improve general written, oral, problem identification and solving, mapping, and artistic expression wiII also generate essays, video recordings, and artwork of the students on the way they feel about the county and the shape it should take in the future. These documents and drawings along with the video clips will be shared with the Shaping Orange County's Future Task Force, elected officials, interested citizens, and the students themselves in a multimedia presentation sculpted from materials collected from the in-class meetings and assignments. Portions of these documents will be incorporated where applicable into the Task Force's final report to the elected officials. At the end of the in-class presentations and project curriculum, 50 of the students from each grade level will attend an intensive, day-long planning charette where they will learn more planning design techniques, work with students from other parts of the county (within the two school districts), and provide more input into the final product of Shaping Orange County's Future. This Youth Visioning Effort would benefit the overall education of the participating students by: .e introducing them to community planning processes and the multi-disciplinary profession of planning; enhancing the student's oral and written communication skills; providing leadership and consensus building skills; o showing how many things they are learning in school are interrelated and come together in the"real world"; and most importantly, allowing their voices to be heard in shaping the future of Orange County. Shaping Orange County's Future will be able to provide excellent staffing service to the students through the coordination of the four local government jurisdictions involved, two school districts, and students of UNC at Chapel Hill. More specifically, Shaping Orange County's Future offers: o professional planning staff from three jurisdictions; o volunteers from UNC's Department of City and Regional Planning; o the collaboration of teachers within the two public school districts; o the capacity to use the information gleaned from the Youth Visioning Effort in the Shaping Orange County's Future initiative; and o the application of previous youth education experience with a less intensive Shaping Orange County's Future pilot project scheduled for this Fall with area 5th graders.