The Haines Economic Development Corporation, or HEDC, hosted a community workshop on Saturday. Over 30 people attended the event, held online and in person at the library, to give input into a new five year plan HEDC is working on. Facilitating the meeting was Consultant Rebecca Braun, of the McKinley Research Group, which has been hired to help develop the plan.
“The idea was to try to generate the community driven building blocks, to help craft a high level strategic plan for the next five years that will be refined most likely with further public input and discussion.”
Participants were guided through discussions around questions such as what their hopes and visions are for the community, or why they want to live here.
“The meeting was really meant to be a collaborative, interactive workshop. So we provided a bit of overview material at the beginning and broke people into groups for a lot of small group discussion, then coming together to report out.”
Braun has not yet had a chance to organize the notes she has gathered during the meeting, but said a couple things stood out:
“I was impressed that a number of people showed up and showed interest, and that shows community engagement and that’s a positive, I think another impression I had was there seems to be a self awareness in Haines about the struggle the community sometimes has with conflicting visions and difficulty collaborating and I sensed a strong desire among the people there when they talked about vision, having the vision for a community that was collaborative and supportive and could come together around some shared values and ideas. I think that’s a positive.”
Next for Braun is to process the data she gathered during her visit, and work with HEDC board and staff to clarify the next steps, likely including some more public discussions.
In working with different communities, Braun has witnessed how the pandemic has affected our confidence in the future.
“I think every community is still adapting on the fly, to a less certain universe in a lot of ways. It seems like we are moving out of the pandemic times, there are predictions to a kind of normal type of tourism season, but I think everybody is a little more sanguine that we can’t actually control or predict everything.”
