Executive Summary

From Sustaining Jackson Hole Wiki

Underlying Sustaining Jackson Hole is the legacy question: What legacy does the current generation of Jackson Hole residents want to leave for future generations? Put another way, what qualities that we enjoy today do we want to leave for future generations?

To Sustaining Jackson Hole’s organizers, the answer to this question is lies in four basic premises. First, the decisions that Jackson Hole makes about its future can be no better than its understanding of itself today.

Second, in order to fully understand Jackson Hole, each of its many facets needs to be recognized and understood. Third, because the future is primarily the result of small, incremental changes, Jackson Hole needs to constantly monitor itself.

Fourth, past planning efforts and the current political climate suggest that the challenges facing Jackson Hole have become too complex to be effectively addressed through traditional means – i.e. by individuals, organizations, or even local government acting on their own. Instead, a new model of community decision making must be developed, one grounded in a clear understanding of facts and beliefs, and one relying on coalitions – of individuals, organizations, businesses, and the government – to embrace opportunities and effect solutions.

This question, and these premises, form the foundation of Sustaining Jackson Hole. What is a Sustainable Community? In the view of Sustaining Jackson Hole’s sponsors – The Charture Institute, the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce, and the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative – a Sustainable Community is one which meets three criteria:

1. It rigorously defines and quantifies the many aspects of its character;
2. It specifically identifies those qualities which the current generation feels must be made available to future generations; and
3. It acts to measurably preserve and enhance those qualities.
The Sustaining Jackson Hole process was designed to help the Jackson Hole community address these criteria. To rigorously define and quantify the many aspects of its character, Sustaining Jackson Hole identified twelve separate Areas of Interest into which Jackson Hole’s activities could be divided:

• Agriculture & Heritage
• Arts
• Business & Economy
• Civic Affairs
• Education
• Environment
• Human Services
• Land Use & Housing
• Philanthropy
• Recreation
• Resource Use
• Transportation

Through a variety of methods, volunteers with interest and/or expertise in these different fields were recruited to serve on Area of Interest Working Groups. Ultimately, roughly 150 volunteers participated, representing over 100 different businesses, governmental entities, and non-profit organizations. Each Working Group held three meetings, each lasting no more than two hours.

The three Working Group meetings were organized around three basic strategic planning questions: Where are we?

The purpose of this question was to determine what was actually known about each Area of Interest. Working Group members were asked what data they would use as the basis of a 10 minute, fact-based talk about their organization. Based on this, they were then asked what information they would collectively use to give a 10 minute, data-oriented talk about their Area of Interest. This information formed the basis of the Area of Interest chapters; all information not making the “10 minute cut” was placed in the appendix.

Where do we want to be? The purpose of this question was to determine what qualities the Working Group would like to see sustained for future generations. The focus was on developing a Statement of Ideal for the Area of Interest. The Statement of Ideal describes how Working Group members would like to see their Area of Interest in an ideal world, and differs from a mission or vision statement in that each component part of the statement can be unambiguously defined and measured.

How do we get there? Sustaining Jackson Hole 2005 added an action component, namely asking each Working Group to identify one task it could complete in the coming year that addressed an issue identified during its meetings. Each Working Group accomplished all three tasks within the allotted number of meetings. Separate chapters of this report provide Introduction and Background, a discussion of Methodology, the findings of each Working Group, and explanations of each group’s action steps. The “Judging Our Success” section following this summary describes some of the to-date successes of Sustaining Jackson Hole.

The information gathered through the Sustaining Jackson Hole process provides the most comprehensive statistical snapshot ever developed of Jackson Hole. Further, because these data were developed by people working directly in each Area of Interest, the information is not only the best available, but also the most current and relevant.

These strengths noted, the data gathering process pointed out two fundamental shortcomings the Jackson Hole community needs to address if it hopes to improve the quality of its decision making. The first is that a great deal about Jackson Hole is simply not known, even by those most closely involved in the different Areas of Interest. The amount of significant information Jackson Hole does not know about itself is reflected in the Wish List Indicators developed by each Working Group. As the name suggests, Wish List Indicators are those data the Working Groups could not obtain, but felt would provide important information about their Area of Interest.

The other data shortcoming identified by the Sustaining Jackson Hole process is that the data currently gathered about Jackson Hole tell the community very little about the things that really matter to the people working in each Area of Interest. Put another way, the extant data about Jackson Hole reveal very little about the progress being made toward Jackson Hole becoming an ideal community. In the view of the Sustaining Jackson Hole sponsors, it is a waste of resources to develop or consider data that do not help leaders make more thoughtful decisions about the future. Yet if decision makers today were to ask how much progress Jackson Hole is making toward any of the twelve Statements of Ideal, they would find very little information addressing that question. If the community finds value in the various Statements of Ideal, this finding suggests that local information gathering processes and resources need to be re-examined, and almost certainly re-directed.

Ultimately, the Statements of Ideal were an attempt to help identify the qualities about their community current Jackson Hole residents want to pass on to future generations. Combined, these statements provide the broad outlines of the legacy current residents would like to leave for future generations. However, to even begin to approach such an ideal future, there is a great deal of work to be done. In particular, the community needs to devote resources to refining a collective vision of the future, figuring out how to measure and monitor the qualities underlying that vision and, most critically, develop ways of working together to help bring about that vision.

While each of these is a daunting task, the sponsors’ hope is that future generations will view Sustaining Jackson Hole as an important first step toward Jackson Hole becoming a truly Sustainable Community. In particular, the Sustaining Jackson Hole process provides the community with a platform to determine where it is, to ask itself where it is going; and figure out a way to get there. Building on this platform, and with luck and hard work, the community can evaluate its progress toward providing future generations with the same qualities enjoyed by those lucky enough to call Jackson Hole home today.

[edit] Sustaining Jackson Hole: Judging our Success

A critical belief underlying Sustaining Jackson Hole is the importance of incremental change. Significant change - whether in an individual, organization, or community – rarely occurs overnight, but instead is a consequence of a series of small changes over time. On a day-to-day basis, incremental change is easy to miss: it's much harder for a parent to see the changes in a child than it is for the distant relative who sees him or her only rarely. The same principle holds true for changes in a community: one day, the community seems to be a different place, but no one is quite sure how that happened.

By asking Working Groups to establish Statements of Ideal, Sustaining Jackson Hole was looking for participants to do more than simply describe a vague ideal future. Instead, the Statement of Ideal exercise forced participants to define the future in a way that would allow them to clearly and unambiguously measured progress toward – or away from – that ideal.

In the course of this exercise, an almost-magical thing happened: the Working Groups became a safe environment for thinking about Jackson Hole's future. The Working Groups brought people together who understood and respected each other's line of work, and did so in a way free of competition, threats, or crisis. This dynamic allowed the meetings to become a place to explore and celebrate: the community participants call home; the line of work they follow; and the fact that other people in Jackson Hole could lend insight, empathy, and support for the thorny issues facing participants on a day-to-day basis.

The net result? Most Working Group meetings became venues for exchanging ideas, discussing common issues, and identifying areas where group members could work together to improve their respective organizations and Areas of Interest. In this way, the Working Groups developed a way to harness and direct the reality of incremental change, as well as its effects on the community's future. Put another way, the Working Group meetings became an implicit endorsement of two of the Sustaining Jackson Hole organizers' fundamental beliefs. One is that of incremental change: the steps taken by different Working Groups may not mean much individually, but collectively they will make each Area of Interest - and ultimately the community - that much better. The other is that Jackson Hole's challenges and opportunities have become so complex that they will be most effectively addressed by coalitions of individuals and organizations coming together around common interests. The time is essentially past when an individual or even an organization can effectively change Jackson Hole. Instead, important future changes will be the result of collaborative groups bringing their collective talents to bear on an issue they collectively identify and concerned about. In this context, Sustaining Jackson Hole measures its success through two types of outcomes: one event-oriented; the other process-oriented.

The event-oriented benchmark is the “State of Our Community” conference. The Sustaining Jackson Hole organizers have two goals for this conference. One is to raise the Jackson Hole community's overall understanding of itself. The other is to provide an annual means for community selfassessment – for judging what progress has been made, and why. Currently, no such tool exists in Jackson Hole, which makes it essentially impossible to track - much less direct - change of any sort, particularly the incremental kind.

The process-oriented benchmark is in actions of the different Working Groups, in particular each group's efforts to act on issues identified in the group meetings. In this area, Sustaining Jackson Hole's primary job is to develop an environment in which participants can recognize and embrace incremental change, and judge for themselves how well they are moving toward an ideal future. In turn, Sustaining Jackson Hole's success in each Working Group is measured by how well the participants come to understand and embrace the project's fundamental tenets, and by the quantity and quality of the action steps identified by the various groups. Below is a listing of some of the process accomplishments of the different Sustaining Jackson Hole Working Groups.

Agriculture & Heritage
The Agriculture & Heritage Working Group recognized that no comprehensive timeline existed of key dates in Jackson Hole's history, so they developed a draft for the Sustaining Jackson Hole 2005 report. They also recognized that a critical piece of such a timeline would be determining when Jackson Hole's dude ranches opened and closed. Both of these efforts will be refined before Sustaining Jackson Hole 2006.

Arts
The Arts Working Group identified a major issue and a major opportunity. The major issue is that Teton County's arts non-profits don't have a uniform way of measuring their activities, whether finances, performances, classes, audience size, or any other indicator. In turn, this is a problem because it prevents the arts community from being able to speak authoritatively about its size, reach, or effects. To address this issue, the Arts Working Group members are meeting to establish such uniform measures.

The major opportunity is the fact that there is no “one-stop shop” for information about Jackson Hole's arts activities. To address this opportunity, the Arts Working Group members are meeting to establishing a website with such information.

Business & Economy
The Business & Economy Working Group recognized that the Town and County zoning regulations are increasingly ill-suited for the needs of the community's emerging “knowledge-based” economy. To address this issue, members are looking into how other communities zone land in a way that allows for such uses.

Civic Affairs
In both the 2004 and 2005 Civic Affairs Working Group meetings, it became apparent how difficult it is to develop a joint accounting system for doing an “apples-to-apples” comparison of the Town and County budgets. This has helped inform thinking about consolidating the two governments.

Education
Recognizing that collaboration between Jackson Hole's different secondary schools is important to maintaining the valley's overall sense of community, the Education Working Group is working in conjunction with the Environment Working Group to facilitate a “Dark Skies” project, run collaboratively by students from Jackson Hole High School, the Journeys School, and the Jackson Hole Community School. As envisioned, this will begin in the 2005-2006 school year, and be an annual program.

Environment
As a consequence of Sustaining Jackson Hole and the efforts described in the “Education” section above, Teton County is under informal consideration as a candidate “Dark Sky Community” by the International Dark Sky Association.

Human Services
In early 2004, in recognition of their mutual interests and challenges, Jackson Hole's many health and social services organizations came together to create the Systems of Care group. Many members of this group participated in Sustaining Jackson Hole 2004, and in that process found a number of techniques they could apply to structuring the activities and outcomes of the Systems of Care effort. Recognizing this synergy, in 2005 the Systems of Care group became the defacto Sustaining Jackson Hole Human Services group.

Land Use & Housing
The Land Use & Housing Working group's discussions shed a great deal of light on the discrepancies in approach, information gathering, and the like between the Town and County planning departments. This has made it difficult to develop a complete understanding of land use and development patterns in the community as a whole.

Philanthropy
Much of the discussion in the Philanthropy Working Group focused around the fact that there is no comprehensive understanding of the extent of Teton County's giving patterns. This complicates matters from both the donor and recipient perspectives. As a result, emphasis was placed on simply finding out how much giving and receiving goes on, to establish a baseline against which to judge future activity.

There was also a recognition of the need to document how the non-profit sector is growing, and how it is assuming an increasingly important role in the community's life. The group identified this as a research priority, although members do not have the time to pursue this work themselves. Once this information is established, focus can be turned to understanding the reasons underlying the community's culture of philanthropy.

Recreation
Although recreational opportunities form the foundation of both Jackson Hole's older (i.e. tourism) and newer (i.e. lifestyle) economies, there is very little understanding of its scope, much less how that scope is changing. Based on the Sustaining Jackson Hole 2004 discussions, Recreation Working Group participants worked to bring better quality information to the 2005 discussions. In the coming year, the group hopes to explore specific subjects such as the extent of climbing activity in the Tetons.

Resource Use
The Resource Use Working Group identified two major gaps in Teton County's understanding of itself, and is acting to address both. One gap is in understanding how much waste is thrown away that could be locally recycled. To answer this question, members of the group conducted a “trash audit” in early October by sorting through random samples of residential and commercial trash. The other gap is in not having a “traditional” set of sustainability indicators for Teton County. The Resource Use Working Group is meeting to research other communities’ efforts, and develop a set appropriate for Teton County.

Transportation
The Transportation Working Group recognized that there were no good forums for regularly convening the myriad parties interested in transportation issues in Teton County. To address this problem, the group is attempting to organize a “Transportation Summit” sometime after the “State of Our Community 2005” conference.