Key questions:
- What are the community’s short- and long-term goals?
- How do these goals relate to the previously identified priorities?
- What actions will be taken to accomplish the developed goals?
- Who/what are the identified assets that will take part in these goals?
- How can you create community partnerships to keep communities engaged and informed of the process towards these goals?
Set goals
Your group has done a good deal of work to get to this point. You have had deep discussions around Tree Equity, collected and shared that feedback with community members and organizations, thought comprehensively about what is most important to your community and evaluated the existing resources that your group can use to address those priorities. Now think what changes you want to see come about in your community— these will be your goals.
Your goals will build on the priorities and assets and gaps your community group identified earlier in this process. They should strike a balance between feasibility and ambition. Some additional characteristics of strong goals include:
- Specific – your goals should be detailed enough that they help you see your path forward rather than confuse you. This specificity should also help to re-ground yourself or your group in the “why” of your efforts anytime new challenges or questions arise.
- Meaningful – the motivation to do community work is often emotion-driven and human-centered, so your goals should inspire by keeping your group’s values at the center.
- Time-bound – your goals should be developed with a timeline in mind, or else it will be difficult to coordinate the sequence of your efforts. Without a schedule, your goals may also feel daunting. In the process outlined below, you will be asked to develop a timeline after establishing your goal(s).
Use the steps below to work through the goal development process. The table will help you to visualize how these different steps come together in a way that build on each other.
Access a downloadable version of this table. Set Goals and Take Action Table
- List your priorities. Take your list of priorities from Phase 2 and insert them in the “Priority” column.
- Write down your goals. Consider what a goal might be for each of those priorities and jot down the idea in the “Goal” column. Don’t get stuck trying to come up with the perfect goal right away, but simply get it down for . You can always come back and refine those goals. As a guiding question, think about success will look like when creating your goals.
- Identify relevant strengths. Think about the assets identified in Phase 3. Decide which of those can help you achieve the goals you wrote down and note them in the “Assets & Gaps” column. Also consider the gaps — those can be turned into goals if it speaks to something critical that the community wants to accomplish. For example, in Phase III the example was given that a gap could be that the community has many siloes and disparate efforts. A goal may be to have monthly convenings for all the block clubs and other groups in the community.
- Review Your Goals. Take time to think deeply about whether your initially stated goals match your intentions. Can you clearly see how your goals tie back to your priorities? If not, consider how you can refine them to better address your priorities. Approach this as an iterative process where you will make improvements as you go along. For example, a goal might be to increase tree canopy in your community, or it might more specifically address residents having more equitable access to trees and green space. In practice, both of those goals may inform actions having to do with tree planting, but the latter emphasizes equitable access and may mean increased community involvement to ensure that trees are placed next to residents’ homes with the greatest need. The two goals can result in mutually beneficial outcomes of increased trees in the community but are driven by different priorities. They also each speak to different actions to get there.
- Develop Actions. Once you feel good about the goals you have created, you can go to the next step to develop actions. This is the last piece of the planning process of this Community Action Guide and is where you will transition to implementation. Your actions are the specific steps you will take to create and maintain the momentum to accomplish your goals. Break down actions into as many small tasks as you need to start seeing the full pathway towards implementation. Another way to think about your actions is like an instruction manual for achieving your goals. As you are working to develop your actions, if you still feel unclear about how to connect them to your goals, return to the criteria for strong goals and see if you need to refine them. Consider the very first action you need to take to accomplish each goal. If it’s hard to come up with one, then it could be that your goals are too broad and you need to make them more specific. Again, this is an iterative process and do not hesitate to return to earlier steps if you need.
Below is an example of what this table might look like for a community group:
Say that community members have noted a strong presence of youth in the community who are not often present at community events or aware of neighborhood activities. They also feel that youth should have a say in the decisions that will impact the future of their neighborhood, since they are the next generation to inherit it. This leads them to name youth engagement as a priority. Based on this, the community comes up with the goal to increase youth leadership in the community. Actions are then determined with the assets in mind developed in Phase 3. In this case, the community has noted an existing relationship with a local tree planting organization that will be used to leverage some shared interests. Similar to this example, you can leverage the assets identified in Phase 3 to partner with a local organization.
