— About Blueprint — Listen — Connect — Craft — Reflect —
At Virginia Community Voice, we equip neighbors in marginalized communities to realize their vision for their neighborhoods and prepare institutions to respond effectively. The Community Voice Blueprint describes our four-stage process of community engagement. The process starts with listening.
Community Voice asks neighbors what it would look like and take for their community to thrive. Very simply, we think of thriving as reaching one’s full potential. A thriving community is one in which all people who live there are reaching their fullest potential.
Thriving looks and feels different depending on the person or community. Community Voice focuses on neighborhoods that are by common metrics, not thriving, but we don’t come in with pre-set agenda or ready-made solution. Instead, we look to the people who live there to tell us their vision for their neighborhood. We listen to understand community strengths and challenges, and neighbors’ interests and hopes for the future.
In the context of the Community Voice process, community refers to geographically defined areas, and groups of people that share a common history or interest, a sense of collective identity, and shared values and norms.
To get to a robust understanding of community thriving, Community Voice brings together qualitative data such as lived experience and historical context, as well as disaggregated data from sources such as the census. This is our “Data Sweet Spot” and when informed by these diverse sources of knowledge we believe people can make more equitable decisions.
