Community Strategies
A Community-Driven Action Effort that Creates a Community-Scale Strategy, Identifies Projects that Support the Strategy, and Strengthens the Projects’ Funding Proposals.
A request for proposals for the Specific Projects and Community Strategies pathways will open on March 27, 2026. Applications are due on April 30, 2026. Selected proposals will be notified no later than July 31, 2026.
The Community Strategies track is an opportunity for communities to address their future in compelling, realistic, practical, and implementable ways. Responding to existing community assets, aspirations, needs, challenges, and previous work, it uses design thinking to create a strategy to move the community forward. It promotes more value from individual project investments by creating specific, fundable projects that support the community strategy and support each other. Community Strategies work also includes creating materials that support and strengthen the community’s efforts to secure funding from other sources in the future.
Due to the high level of engagement and investment in community work that Community Strategies provides, the effort may last up to 12 months. Some compensation for people’s time and funding to cover community meeting expenses will be included in the work budget.
In round 3, the Community Strategies pathway will prioritize communities that have projects or timely needs in one or more of the following focus areas for selection in order to better position the community for funding and partnership opportunities: Planned Infrastructure Projects, Water Issues, Environment-based Infrastructure Systems, and Future Re/development Projects.
The University of Minnesota Design Center and ESMC Team Members will work with individual communities on how best to meet their needs. But all Community Strategies work includes:
- Creating an inclusive public engagement process that engages a wide range of community members and organizations in a community-driven process that includes community conversations, listening sessions, meetings, photography, etc.,
- Assembling a working group to partner with the Minnesota Design Center,
- Conducting site visits,
- Gathering information generated by the community’s previous planning and project proposal efforts to inform the effort,
- Identifying and mapping community assets,
- Redefining community challenges as opportunities,
- Devising a realistic and actionable community-based strategy built upon the community’s assets, opportunities, and aspirations that can move the community forward,
- Creating fundable projects that support the community-based strategy and build upon previous community work,
- Identifying and supporting community project champions,
- Identifying realistic funding sources for individual projects,
- Creating a community-led process to prioritize the projects, and
- Supporting community efforts to pursue project funding.