Overview of a Generic Planning Process Where Are We?     What are our assets and what resources do we have available? What does the information we have tell us about our community? This step usually involves collecting and analyzing information about the community. It usually includes geography, history, population, economy, housing, land use, public services etc. Where Are We Going?       What are the trends affecting our community? How is it changing? This expands a bit on the step above by looking at trends over time to understand how the community is changing. Where Do We Want to Go?         What do we value as a community? What do we like about our community? What would we like to change? Are we happy with where the trends are taking us? What is our vision for what we want our community to be? Do we want to actively pursue it? The above steps help to support informed decision making and help to assure that perceptions are grounded in reality. This step can be the most fun, it can also be challenging. It involves working with the community to think about what it wants to be, how it wants to change, and how it wants to remain the same.  Community participation is critical at this step. We need to involve the public in ways that will build consensus and momentum for progress and positive change. Well structured and well supported group process is a key to success at this point. How Do We Get There? Do we agree on some "low hanging fruit" or "just do it" action items? What other short or long term actions do we want to take? Do we want to protect the things we like or value through guidelines or regulation?   We now have an inventory, an understanding of trends and some consensus of where we want to go. The "how" step involves  developing an action plan and that  can be more contentious. Even if we adopt the vision plan at this stage and stop here (and some communities do) we have accomplished a lot. We also have a sound base for future decision making. As part of developing an action plan we begin to get specific about what we want to do by identifying short and long term actions and recommendations. Some of this may require additional research and public discussion to reach agreement.