Resilience emerges through the strength, creativity, and commitment of a community and its individuals.
We live in a rapidly changing world. The Cedar Falls Resilience Plan will build from our community's vitality, passion and sense of purpose to maintain our potential, and our abundance.
The resilience plan seeks to create an action guide that informally stitches local resources together in ways that can improve prosperity and stability for our community and all of its citizens, families, businesses, and organizations.
The Cedar Falls Resilience plan was created following the initial public kick-off in the fall of 2020. It includes input taken from multiple community workshops held in October of 2020. Due to COVID-19 precautions, these workshops were held online.
On November 10, 2020, the information from the workshops was presented at a virtual Town Hall meeting. The public feedback gathered from that meeting was then used as the foundation for creating a series of three worksheets. These worksheets were available to the community beginning in mid-December 2020 and wrapped up in mid-March 2021. The results were used to draft the Cedar Falls Resilience Plan.
The Resilience Plan identifies actions needed as a community supporting a collective goal to be a resilient city. It provides a guide that not only utilizes existing community plans and actions, but also includes sought after public involvement to identify additional actions needed to improve our prosperity and stability.
Project Schedule
Big Idea Public Workshops: Start Tuesday, October 20, 2020 and end October 29th - Complete
Big Idea Self-guided Public Workshops: Start Wednesday, October 21, 2020 and end November 3rd - Complete
Workshops Summary Town Hall Meeting: Tuesday, November 10, 2020 at 7:00 to 8:00 PM Online - Complete
The summary presentation video is here: https://youtu.be/RqxUN81b-KM?t=1
Online public Worksheet One opens on December 15 and closes December 22nd - Complete
Online public Worksheet Two opens in mid-January 2021 - Complete
Online public Worksheet Three opens late March - Complete
Public Presentation - April 12, 2022 (updated)
Resilience Plan Tentative Completion: Late Spring or Early Summer 2022 (updated)
About the Planning Process
The process being used to develop the resilience plan follows a stepwise approach. It is sequential, incrementally building forward from what was learned or accomplished from the previous step or activity. There are three overlapping steps:
Discovery
Step 1 of the planning process began in September with preparation for public engagement. A public survey and six community workshops were conducted along with a summary townhall presentation. The Workshops were organized around energy, the environment, water and flooding, the economy and jobs, diversity and equity, and community cohesion to gather community ideas.
Development
Step 2 of the process sifts through the information gathered from the surveys and workshops to assemble action items. These items will focus on initiatives that can be accomplished locally by individuals, community organizations, businesses, and the City. The intent is to make our community more resilient to forces that are unpredictable and many times out of our local control. The overarching goal is to ensure that the Cedar Falls community continues to offer a high quality of life to all members.
As part of Step 2, there will be three, two-part Worksheets published for public input with the first in December, another in January, and one in late March 2021. Each of these worksheets refines the community's priorities and preferences for initiatives to help make our City more resilient.
Finalization
Step 3 of the planning process involves synthesizing and organizing the plan into report form. The report will be presented in at a virtual open house in the spring of 2021. Input at the open house will be considered for inclusion in the final report.
