"I travel with a crystal ball," Rebecca Ryan jokes. As a futurist, she does a lot of travelling--and a lot of predicting. Of course, she uses data rather than mystic arts--she says she's informed by trends in five areas: society, technology, economy, environment, and politics. Lately, she's visited the Scenic City, and she's coming back next week. It's part of the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce's visioning process, tentatively titled "A Vision for Economic Prosperity."
In this story, Chamber CEO and President Christy Gillenwater tells us more about what the Chamber is doing and how the public can get involved.
TRANSCRIPT
The Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce is looking to the future. Their annual meeting took place at the convention center downtown, hundreds of business owners and employees meeting for awards presentations and speeches. Chamber President and CEO Christy Gillenwater told the crowd about the Chamber’s NEW planning process… called “A Vision for Economic Prosperity.”
GILLENWATER: And as you all know, we have a rich history of visioning in Chattanooga and Hamilton County, going back to the 80s, 90s, 2000s, then here in the last decade.
These visioning efforts… residents coming together and planning for the future… are credited with the city’s turnaround.
In 1983, the Chattanooga Venture organization launched, bringing together the public, elected officials, and business leaders. Downtown was then transformed… tourist attractions like the Tennessee Aquarium anchoring the changes, with the city going from a polluted industrial center into a model of urban revitalization.
Other visioning efforts have included Thrive 20-55… a citizen-led, public-private regional planning endeavor.
Christy Gillenwater says now the Chattanooga Chamber is excited, because they’re bringing in a trained professional, Rebecca Ryan, for another visioning process.
GILLENWATER: So Rebecca Ryan is a known futurist with Strategic Foresight as her company. She's based out of Madison, Wisconsin and it's a relatively… I think more and more companies are using futurists, but as communities, um, it's something that we really thought was important.
RYAN: I travel with a crystal ball.
This is Ryan being interviewed by KCWI in Iowa.
RYAN: Yeah, so the shortcut for futurists is an acronym, STEEP. Society, technology, economy, environment, politics. So, we look at trends in those five areas.
Ryan has already been to Chattanooga, and will return. In July, Ryan met with Gillenwater and other community and business leaders and looked at data and trends relevant to this area. Gillenwater says there were a whole slew of issues.
GILLENWATER: One was demographic shifts. You know the growth in our Latino population. Are we really well positioned for handling that growth in terms of bilingual staff at all levels. You know, in the community, right? So thinking through that, how are the schools ready or the hospital's ready are, are we all ready for that?
Infrastructure was another one.
GILLENWATER: In our region, you know, are we as well positioned as we want to be in terms of infrastructure? I would argue no community is but… what can we do though intentionally to help mitigate that and advance our ability to address those trends in the future.
Ryan is supposed to return to Chattanooga next week. Gillenwater says in their next session, they’ll go through different iterations, like…
GILLENWATER: Um, what if we didn't change course? What if we stayed as we are a, what if we aspired for more? What if unfortunately some sort of tragedy happened here or national disaster, how would we as a community band together and address that? So these are some of the things that, um, you know, the processes by which she takes us through in order to figure out what our 20 year trend is. Very data driven, very diverse thought process.
A couple of business-oriented questions the Chamber is asking in this visioning process: what kind of jobs does Chattanooga want to attract? What kind of companies do we want to incentivize to be here? But it’s NOT all about business, this process, and it’s NOT just for business owners.
The public input phase is coming.
From September 15th to October 15th, they’ll have a survey online… a chance for YOU to get involved in the visioning process.
GILLENWATER: Because we really need people to start reacting and we're still building out, you know, what all that will look like, how to engage the community as best we can to react.
Gillenwater says the Chamber is raising money to fund the process… 50-thousand-dollars, so far. They expected to have their first, detailed report online by the end of November.
