JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING, 2004-PRESENT
Project Description
SJH was borne from the belief that the more Jackson Hole knows about itself, the better its chances of making wise choices about its future. Put another way, Sustaining Jackson Hole is both a tool to educate the Jackson Hole community about itself, and an expression of hope that the better-informed the community is today, the better its choices will be; and the better its choices today, the better the chances that future generations of Jackson Hole residents will enjoy the same types of opportunities left to today’s residents by our forebears. (Sustaining Jackson Hole - Report, 2004)
A central question lies at the heart of the annual Sustaining Jackson Hole (SJH) process: what legacy do residents want to leave for future generations? Put another way, what qualities about the community do residents want to sustain for future generations? Variations on this question have been asked by thousands of communities across the country as they undergo visioning or master planning processes, but that is where SJH and other processes diverge. Many communities attempt to answer such a question by asking detailed, qualitative questions of residents; by taking photographs or documenting favorite places; or by describing intangible qualities that are important. SJH turns to objective data rather than subjective analysis to identify important community qualities and determine how well they are being sustained. The project examines hundreds of community variables, including information that is not obviously tied to the character of Jackson Hole: average commuting time, mean high school SAT scores, fundraising rates for local non-profits, annual rainfall, and many more.
The initial project stages involved forming working groups, asking group members to identify and collect large amounts of data they felt were important to understanding the community, evaluating current trends and indicators, creating “Statements of Ideal” for many aspects of the community, and developing recommendations for steps to sustain and improve the community’s essential qualities. Completed in 2004, this component of the project resulted in two publications with very comprehensive information about Jackson Hole and the SJH process. One of the main goals of the SJH project from the outset was to create a process that wouldn’t end, but would rather grow and improve over the years; the project has done so by repeating itself every year, each time building upon the large data sets, revising predictions and recommendations, and developing new strategies for implementation.
Finance and Support
The SJH process was initiated and supported in large part by the Charture Institute, which conceived many of the theoretical underpinnings of the process. The other two project sponsors, the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce and the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, provided much of the remaining support in terms of funding, staff time, and other resources. Project organizers estimate that the initial phase of the SJH process, ending in 2004, cost approximately $100,000. Of that, only $4,500 was obtained through outside funding, in the form of a grant from the Community Foundation of Jackson Hole.
The SJH process is unique from a funding and organizing standpoint in that the entire process repeats itself indefinitely, on an annual basis. Organizers do not expect the ongoing annual costs to approach those of the first year since much of the groundwork will be complete, but there is a need for ongoing fundraising and development. Organizers saw a need in the first year to gather widespread support (conceptual and financial) from the community at large and asked each participating group to raise at least $500 to support the next year’s process (as well as to formally endorse the project and commit to further participation). With representatives of 96 local businesses, agencies, and non-profits participating in the first year, this funding initiative brings in a large part of the necessary funds for ongoing years.
Recognizing a need to fund measures arising from Sustaining Jackson Hole, the Charture Institute established 1% for the Tetons – the first local affiliate of the international 1% for the Planet initiative. Local businesses are asked to contribute 1% of their annual revenues to the fund, which in turn are granted to finance projects and initiatives identified by SJH. Established in the summer of 2006, 1% for the Tetons has already collected over one hundred thousand dollars for funding such grants.
Stakeholders
Jackson Hole is valley nestled between the Teton and Gros Ventre ranges in Teton County; it includes the Town of Jackson, Teton Village, the Grand Teton National Park, and numerous other small communities. Many of the project partners and volunteers were based in the Town of Jackson, but the project invited participation from residents and organizations throughout the valley. More than 110 volunteers actively contributed to the SJH project in 2004 and more than 150 in 2005. SJH focuses involvement more on local businesses, organizations, and institutions than on individual citizens, and the project now involves more than 100 entities.
Methods
When beginning the Sustaining Jackson Hole process, organizers first attempted to define sustainability – a word that is acquiring new meanings almost daily. The final report presents this working definition:
In the view of the Sustaining Jackson Hole sponsors, a Sustainable Community is one which meets three criteria:
1. It rigorously defines and quantifies the many aspects of its character;
2. It specifically identifies those qualities which the current generation feels must be made available to future generations; and
3. It measurably preserves and enhances those qualities.
The initial planning process spanned several months in 2003 and 2004 and allowed organizers to develop strategies for the participatory aspects of the project as well as the actual data-driven research and analysis. The planning team (comprised of sponsoring organizations’ staff) identified the basic goals of the project and then separated the community’s interests and values into twelve distinct “Areas of Interest”: Arts, Environment, Resource Sustainability, Business & Economy, Health, Religion, Civic Affairs, Land Use & Housing, Social Services, Education, Recreation, and Transportation. They recruited community members for the working groups in each Area through press releases, newspaper and radio ads, interviews, targeted letters and emails, and personal invitations, attempting to include the community’s most knowledgeable citizens for each Area. Once participants were selected, the whole group met roughly every two weeks in 2004 to set dates and timetables for the process; to discuss goals and strategies; and to address issues arising in the working groups.
Each working group met independently six times in early 2004, to complete four tasks:
- Identify Organization Indicators (data that members would use to describe or characterize their own organizations)
- Identify Area of Interest Indicators (data that members would use to describe or categorize their Area of Interest)
- Develop a Statement of Ideal (a statement describing the Area of Interest in a “future, ideal world… defined so that progress toward that Ideal can be clearly and unambiguously measured.”
For example:
Arts Area of Interest Statement of Ideal
Jackson Hole will be:
- A widely-recognized, year-round center for the presentation, creation, teaching, learning, and appreciation of the performing, visual, and literary arts
- A location with the resources needed for artists to fully express their skills; and
- A community where those who make their living from the arts are able to live and work.
- Identify Ideal Indicators (data that would allow the community to track progress toward its Ideal)
Working group members often completed assignments or extra work outside the meetings, such as collecting data on their own organizations. The groups examined data that was currently available for the area and also developed “Wish Lists” of information that would be useful in tracking indicators, but is not currently available. Working groups drafted reports of their findings by July, which were distributed to all project participants for comment, and then released as a final report in September.
The project did not end with the release of the report, but continued with presentations to staffs and boards of each participating organization. Held in the latter half of 2004, these meetings were used to share the results, update participating organizations, seek official approval of the report, and develop plans for moving forward. Each organization was asked specifically to consider how it could address SJH’s data needs and move toward the Statements of Ideal.
The process has been repeated in subsequent years, with working groups revisiting the data, adding new information, evaluating progress, and considering again how to reach the Statements of Ideal. Based on this subsequent work, The Jackson Hole Almanac, containing all of the available data and an annual report, has been revised and re-issued. Implementation steps are now occurring constantly in organizations and groups throughout the community and organizers are accepting grant applications to help fund projects identified through the Sustaining Jackson Hole process.
A very comprehensive description of the methods, including meeting dates and agendas, is available in the annual Sustaining Jackson Hole: A Community Exploration reports on each sponsoring organization’s website.
Outcomes
Outcomes to date include:
- The Jackson Hole Almanac was first published in 2004 and has been revised based on subsequent years’ efforts.
- The SJH project report was released in 2004 to present the findings and recommendations of the working groups, with the report distributed through websites and partner organizations. Revised versions have been completed each year.
- Based on feedback from participants, the program has been modified and improved each year. In 2005, a one-and-one-half day “State of the Community” conference was held to begin establishing links between different working groups. In 2007, a series of half-day mini-Summits is being run to help each working group address specific issues raised during the Sustaining Jackson Hole process.
- The Charture Institute established “1% for the Tetons” in 2006 – an alliance of businesses donating 1% of their profits to implement project recommendations. In its first year the initiative raised over $125,000 and the inaugural grant cycle began in the spring of 2007.
- Project staff and volunteers have made presentations to most of the participating organizations and other groups throughout Teton County, sharing the results and outcomes of the project and garnering new support.
- SJH partners and working group members have repeated the project each year since 2004 - tracking changes to indicators, revising statements of ideal, establishing new goals and action steps, and collecting more data.
Many more, and more detailed, outcomes have been documented for each Area of Interest and are available in the Jackson Hole Almanac or through the project organizers. Examples include implementing a community-wide “10 x 10” program to reduce per capita energy use and waste production by 10 percent, from 2006 levels, by the end of 2010 (Resource Use Area); creating a “Systems of Care” group that unites and organizes efforts health and social services organizations (Human Services Area); bringing together elected officials, government staff, and ecology scientists to identify decision-makers’ short- and long-term needs for scientific information, and what ecologists can do to provide that information (Environment Area)
Evaluation
Evaluation and monitoring are the point of the whole Sustaining Jackson Hole approach and they are critical to its ongoing success. The initial phases of the project emphasized collection of baseline data and the creation of indicators, all of which are used each year as the process is repeated. Comparisons of indicators and new data are used to evaluate Jackson Hole in each new cycle of working groups and to set new goals for the coming year. Organizers also developed an “event-oriented benchmark” – the “State of Our Community” conference – at which project participants and other community members come together to better understand the community and to assess progress.
SJH also set goals for itself as a project and continues to monitor and evaluate the process through measures of finance, community participation, time, and work created. These efforts to record and assess the project’s effectiveness, efficiency, and equity help to ensure that the project will adapt and change as necessary, as well as making the project easier to understand and replicate elsewhere. The project emphasizes transparency and access to data, posting all meeting minutes, reports, data, and recommendations online and publishing the information in the Jackson Hole Almanac.
Examples of data for baseline project indicators include:
- 2000 volunteer hours of gathering and collecting data
- 110 volunteers, including representatives of 96 businesses, government agencies, or non-profit organizations in 2004; 150 volunteers and more than 100 organizations in 2005
- More than 50 working group meetings
- $100,000 cost of initial project phases with $4,500 coming from outside donations
Innovative Ideas
Sustaining Jackson Hole is creative and unusual in many ways and on many levels, from the philosophies underlying the whole project to the specific methods and tools for implementation and evaluation. Most of the original aspects of the project aren’t actually themselves original; the innovation comes in borrowing and adapting successful ideas from other areas and from recognizing and attacking problems from unusual and carefully-selected angles. Most of the processes and case studies profiled in this document have discrete end points, though they may include ongoing evaluation and implementation steps. SJH is unusual in re-running the entire process each year, enabled by efficiency and organization that allow it to complete a process in a few months where other similar initiatives may take years.
Organization and attention to detail hardly seem innovative, but the ways in which they are used here are relatively rare in large planning processes. Throughout the process, organizers have been meticulous about setting and maintaining goals and keeping records, attempting to avoid pitfalls that many large projects often face. Community planning processes are often so time-consuming that volunteers quickly lose interest or energy and project participation wanes. SJH organizers created a policy at the beginning that each working group would meet no more than five times and for no more than two hours at a time; the groups stick to the policy and participation has increased over the years. Organizers also set a goal of recording the minutes of every meeting and distributing very detailed notes (“quasi-transcripts”) within 72 hours, in order to reach people when interest and momentum was still strong; SJH staff record the meetings in great detail, immediately enter notes into a computer, and send out minutes that participants see as “unusually high quality [in] … comprehensiveness and accuracy.” Seemingly minor procedural and administrative details like these are actually major factors in the longevity of the SJH process, along with satisfaction of participants, and the quality of the outcomes.
In a similar spirit, in 2005, Sustaining Jackson Hole’s organizers recognized they risked burning out working group participants because there were no obvious or readily-available funding sources for the many good project ideas being generated by the Sustaining Jackson Hole working groups. In response, the Charture Institute developed 1% for the Tetons as a way to provide this funding, and in so doing encourage further involvement in Sustaining Jackson Hole.
Many community plans develop vision statements of descriptions of what they would like to see in the future, but the SJH model is distinctly different. The philosophy behind development of “Statements of Ideal” comes from Toyota, which is widely recognized as one of the world’s most successful companies.
“Toyota’s Statement of Ideal provides everyone associated with Toyota – from the boardroom to the shop floor, and extending out through its supply chain – with a tangible, measurable way of both identifying where the organization should be, and evaluating the progress they are making towards getting there… this statement’s power comes from the fact that each component of it is clearly measurable in a binary fashion: either it happened or it didn’t. If it didn’t, Toyota has room to improve.”
Typical community vision statements may accurately describe what a community wants for itself, but it is often near-impossible to find quantitative and objective ways of evaluating them and tracking progress. There is still subjectivity in the SJH process, as the reports acknowledge – through lack of representation in the participants, through lack of data or incorrect data, or through lack of time and resources to fully explore the community’s many qualities, for example – but this process is closer to “objective” than most. More importantly, the process is designed to actively improve itself on an on-going basis.
Finally, SJH’s newest funding strategy is an unusual and successful initiative. 1% for the Tetons uses a similar approach as 1% for the Planet, and so far is the only local affiliate in existence. By advertising and promoting the initiative and giving it a catchy, recognizable name, organizers give participating businesses a marketing boost. Residents of progressive Jackson are likely to support businesses that have committed to 1%. At the same time, because a member business’s financial commitment is a function of its revenues, small mom-and-pop stores and corporate giants alike are treated equally. Fifty two businesses had joined as of spring 2007, a goal organizers expected take two years rather than just ten months.
http://www.nrccooperative.org/SJH.htm
http://www.onepercentforthetetons.org
SUSTAINING JACKSON HOLE AT A GLANCE
COMMUNITY TYPE
Rural/resort
AREA
4,222 sq. miles (Teton County)
2.8 sq. miles (Town of Jackson)
POPULATION
18,251 (2000 Teton County)
8,647 (2000 Town of Jackson)
LOCATION
Western Wyoming
PROCESS
Sustaining Jackson Hole process
PROJECT LEADERS
The Charture Institute
Jackson Hole Chamber of
Commerce
Northern Rockies Conservation
Cooperative
PROJECT THEMES
Conservation
Development
Indicators
Evaluation and Monitoring