Well…not quite. Before you can create your quality-of-life plan, you need to make sure your community is ready to undertake this process. The first step is actually reaching out to and engaging everyone who needs to be involved in developing the plan.

This will include “the usual suspects”: all those neighborhood leaders you know are interested in helping see your community grow and improve. But you should also take this opportunity to reach out to people and groups who may not have been included in the past. (Many times, they haven’t been included simply because they haven’t been asked.) Their perspectives and their energy will be crucial in both setting the vision and in implementing your plan.

The goal at this stage is not just to have all of these diverse stakeholders involved in planning, but for them to take ownership and responsibility for parts of the plan. As you will see, no action item or goal will make it into your quality-of-life plan if you don’t have a group that will be responsible for it. No one group has the capacity to take on all the important items that need to be in the plan, so it’s essential that as many groups as possible are involved.

Also, if you haven’t already done so, now would be a good time to start to form some sort of steering committee to help oversee the planning process. Once your leaders are empowered, they can engage and educate the rest of the community about your plans in a way that promotes neighborhood ownership and involvement in the plan, right from the start.