Alex Downard. Provided image
On the web
To read the entire draft plan, visit https://imagineone85.org/. Hard copies of the plan may also be requested by calling 260-563-5258 or 260-982-4824.
On Monday, Oct. 3, Alex Downard of Downard Development Strategies (DDS) was officially selected to lead the Imagine One 85 initiative.
Grow Wabash County (GWC), on behalf of the Imagine One 85 Steering Committee, announced Downard would “organize and execute various community initiatives that align with the Imagine One 85 countywide comprehensive strategic plan,” said project manager for marketing and events Chelsea Parson.
Imagine One 85 is the comprehensive planning initiative undertaken by community leaders in Wabash County that has been spearheaded by GWC, the Community Foundation of Wabash County (CFWC), and local government leaders from across the community.
Members of the combined Wabash County, Wabash and North Manchester plan commissions met Thursday, June 16 on stage in the auditorium of Wabash High School to approve the recently released Imagine One 85 Comprehensive Plan.
“Thanks in part to grant funding from the Lilly Endowment Gift VII initiative and leaders, stakeholders and community members of Wabash County have spent the past two-plus years working together to develop a countywide strategic comprehensive plan to arrest and reverse decades of population decline. The Imagine One 85 plan is now finalized and has been adopted by all governing bodies in Wabash County,” said Parson.
Parson said as DDS “will take the lead on activating community members and organizations to prioritize, implement, and achieve the 85 recommendations outlined in the countywide comprehensive plan.”
“We are thrilled to contract with Alex and Downard Development Strategies to lead the implementation of the recommendations outlined in the Imagine One85 plan that our community has worked so hard on over the last couple of years,” said GWC president and CEO Keith Gillenwater. “We have worked with Alex often, dating back to his time as a college intern for Grow Wabash County while he was studying at Manchester University. We are confident that Alex and DDS will hit the ground running on these efforts.”
Downard, a resident of Wabash County and a 2020 graduate from Manchester University, established DDS in 2021.
“He demonstrates ample professional experience in project management, business development, and other public affairs, and through his community service on the Manchester Alive board of directors and participation in the Indiana Leadership Forum,” said Parson.
The Imagine One 85 plan includes initiatives relating to housing, workforce, early childhood education, rural broadband, and other quality-of-life opportunities to arrest and reverse Wabash County’s population decline.
In March, the CFWC and GWC released the first publicly available version of the Imagine One 85 comprehensive plan. The group had been hard at work on the project for months. This planning process was launched in July 2020 and was anticipated to last 14 months in total. Dozens of community members gathered for the Imagine One 85 Summit on July 14, 2021, in Honeywell Center Plaza, to help provide their input into the proposed plan.
While northeast Indiana’s 11-county region has consistently grown for four decades, Wabash County has not. The 11-county region’s 2020 population total was 797,701 people for Adams, Allen, DeKalb, Huntington, Kosciusko, LaGrange, Noble, Steuben, Wabash, Wells and Whitley counties, compared to 759,086 in 2010. The three counties that lost population in the past decade were Huntington, Noble and Wabash counties at 462, 79 and 1,912 residents respectively.
After four decades of population decline, there are now around 5,000 fewer residents, a 14 percent decline, one-half of the city of Wabash. To regain the local population and continue to grow as communities, Wabash County will need to add 85 households each year. In addition to general population loss, Wabash County’s labor force has taken a significant hit over the past few years, down from 15,048 in December 2019 to 14,234 in December 2020.
The stated goal of Imagine One 85 is to come up with a plan that “will ensure our future is not left to chance.”
The 100-page, seven-chapter plan includes 85 action items aimed at growing Wabash County’s population.
The plan’s 85 unique recommendations are organized into four topic areas that emerged through community engagement sessions and technical analysis.
These areas include:
• Great Places: Preserving, enhancing, and strengthening the natural environment.
• Prosperity: Fostering a strong entrepreneurial spirit, growing the economy and supporting educational and professional development.
• Housing and Community: Increasing residential options and diversifying housing stock.
• Foundations: Strengthening and modernizing infrastructure and improving community connections, design, and efficiency. First to be addressed are a select number of priority actions aimed at reversing population decline. The plan closes with an implementation agenda that keeps the plan moving forward and avoids the common problem of comprehensive plans – good plans that get shelved.
Funded in part by a GIFT VII leadership grant to the Community Foundation from Lilly Endowment, the efforts included an in-depth study of county economics and demographics. Announced in June 2019, the comprehensive work has engaged multiple firms in technical analysis. They included: the Community Research Institute at Purdue University Fort Wayne, Transform Consulting Group, Becker Consulting, Make No Small Plans, planning NEXT, Ninigret Partners LLC, Burges & Niple, Policy Analytics and One Lucky Guitar.
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