National Community Planning Month 2023

The leaves are changing and football is upon us once again. But don’t let that distract you from National Community Planning Month!!! It doesn’t mean that community planning is only important during one month out of the year. Planning should be a priority throughout the year, but October is for celebration! Celebration of what planning has done for your community and what it can do for you in the future.

National Community Planning Month is a good time to look back on your planning studies and consider how they’ve been implemented so far. This month is also a good time to look back on the good community planning has done for your community. It could be a well-designed new development, or redevelopment of a run-down area of town.

Regardless of how you celebrate National Community Planning Month, it is a good time to sit back and contemplate the impact that planning can have on your community. As the American Planning Association’s website states:

“Planners work to improve the well-being of all people living in our communities by taking a comprehensive perspective. This approach leads to safer, resilient, more equitable, and more prosperous communities. We celebrate the role that planning plays in creating great communities in October with National Community Planning Month.“

Learn more about National Community Planning Month at www.planning.org/ncpm.

National Community Planning Month on Rural Resurrection

As always, Rural Resurrection has a number of planning-related posts for your reading pleasure during this month. Here’s a few posts from the past to quench your planning thirst:

• Brownville Keeps Working on Riverfront (2023) – The resilient Brownville, Nebraska, keeps working to improve. Their latest efforts have resulted in a plan to activate their riverfront.
• What is a Bypass Study? (2022) – There are few critical turning points for communities, highway bypasses are one of them. It’s important to do a bypass impact study for this turning point in a community’s future.
• Why Plan? (2020) – In observance of National Planning Month, we ask the question “Why Plan?”
• 5 Specific Area Plans to Consider (2020) – There’s more to planning than comprehensive planning. Here are 5 specific area plans to consider.

Now, after you thank your local planner (preferably with coffee, the elixir of the overworked planner), go to that shelf in your office and dust off all of your existing community plans. Take some time to read them. Don’t just look at the goals or the renderings of what could be, read it thoroughly to know it inside and out. You’ll have a better appreciation for the plan and will be in a better position to help make it a reality.