In 2005, the West Linn City Council convened a task force of citizens and stakeholders with knowledge and expertise in areas of community sustainability. This committee was charged with making recommendations to Council on how the City could make serious progress towards advancing sustainability in West Linn.
From this emerged the Sustainable West Linn Strategic Plan, guiding efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, reduce the negative impacts of growth and provide a healthy, productive, and meaningful life for all West Linn residents. To advance the Strategic Plan, the City introduced the Civic Ecology approach early and effectively through a series of three workshops in Spring 2014. By successfully enlisting the expertise of many in the community, diverse teams of citizens and stakeholders developed project ideas that support the Strategic Plan, and pledged their support to work with the Sustainability Advisory Board to recruit partners, find funding, establish schedules, and get the projects up and running.
This series of three workshops was just a small step towards convening stakeholders, decision-makers, and the public for the purposes of identifying their community’s existing resources, visioning their future, and establishing the combined hardware and software systems that will help make the city a more resilient, sustainable place to live, work, and play for current and future generations.
Read the Civic Ecology Summary Memorandum (5.4 MB .pdf)
