Community visioning is a process for engaging a large number of citizens in thinking about and planning their community’s future. In doing so, visioning helps create consensus, opens the door to new ideas, and strengthens citizen support for action. Through public involvement, communities identify their purpose, core values, and vision of the future which are then transformed into a manageable and feasible set of community goals and action plan.

Visioning is not a new idea-large corporations, educational institutions, and non-profit organizations have been using these techniques for more than 40 years. Communities throughout the U.S. have created vision plans for their county, cities, and regions. Greenville Vision 2025 was the second vision plan in Greenville County, and has been recognized nationally as an excellent example of a community vision plan. Anderson County has completed their vision plan, and Oconee County is completing their plan. The Upstate region is embarking on a regional vision plan in the spring of 2008.

The plan was developed under the guidance of a steering committee comprised of 43 area citizens. Through a nine-step process which included gathering citizen input through five town hall meetings, twelve focus group sessions, eighteen individual interviews, mail-in and online-based input, goals for the community were offered by citizens. Taking the citizen input, the information was processed by our community vision consulting company, Carpe Diem Community Solutions Inc. Five major themes emerged as major goal areas for our county. They are:

1. Planned Community
2. Working Community
3. Healthy Safe Community
4. Sense of Place
5. Educated Community

The 89 prioritized objectives in the give focus groups will be given to the Implementation Leadership Team to use in developing Vision Partnerships and Alliances. Prospective Vision Partners will include institutions, governmental entities, municipalities, companies, non-profit organizations, individuals and associations. The Vision Partners and Alliances will be asked to support one or more of the 90 objectives of the vision plan as the objectives are brought up for implementation.

The Pickens Vision 2025 Final Report is available for download. This thirty-six (36) page .PDF outlines the entire Vision Plan. Pickens County, South Carolina’s Vision Plan “Your Voice. Your Choice” will serve as a means for improving Pickens County over the next twenty years.

Download Final Plan Here...

The implementation process will start in 2008 and continue through 2025.

Approximately 20 community members from throughout Pickens County have been chosen to serve as the initial Implementation Team by members of the Steering Committee who serve as members of the Board of Directors of Pickens County Vision 2025 Inc. The names and their affiliation or representation are shown in the Committee page. Click here to go directly to the list.

This new committee will start meeting in early 2008, and will oversee the implantation process. The Implementation Team will appoint officers, and name members from their body to head up each of the five (5) focus areas. Along with the heads of the focus areas, they will recommend and solicit Vision Partners to participate in the working task forces to embrace, support, and achieve a selected number of objectives in each of the five (5) focus areas.

The task forces dealing with the chosen objectives will meet, establish current bench marks of the starting point for an objective, and create coalitions and partnerships to achieve an objective within a time frame. The task forces will meet monthly as long as needed to meet the selected objective. They will report back to the Implementation Team quarterly, giving a progress report and results on their plan to achieve their objective.

The Implementation Team will monitor the progress of all the task forces, and provide any additional resources to assist a task force in achieving their objective. The Implementation Team will provide a report to the community on an annual basis giving the progress toward achieving the objectives by each of the five (5) areas.