Community Engagement

What do you love about your community? Where do you spend your time? How could the place you call home be better?

These questions and more were asked during a series of community-wide idea sharing sessions open to the public in the spring of 2022. The “Imagine Hours” were designed to engage the residents of Pottawattamie County in collective thinking about the future of our community. The ideas helped inform the Iowa West Foundation’s strategic visioning process. Below are the results and progress report thus far.

Must-Haves

Economic Development

Education

Healthy Families

Placemaking

Focus Group Experts

Following the Imagine Hours, we invited experts within each of our focus area, who have first-hand experience in their specialties, to dig into the data, help us understand current gaps vs. opportunities, what criteria to consider for evaluating success, and so much more. We are grateful to all those who were able to participate in these valuable sessions.

The Four Outcomes

The input from the Imagine Hour coupled with the focus groups’ recommendations served as a guide to Iowa West Foundation Board’s Strategic Visioning Retreat last fall, which lead to the creation of the following four outcomes as focus areas.