Planning Process

The process for the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Plan began as a committee of stakeholders for the 47th Street commercial corridor, but through the community engagement process, it became clear that the plan needed to address many other aspects of the community surrounding the corridor. To produce a plan that reflected community values and priorities, Great Cities Institute (GCI) in collaboration with the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council engaged residents, businesses, community organizations and other key stakeholders to develop a vision for the future of Back of the Yards.

The planning process had three main phases: information collection, strategy and action development, and final plan development. Information collection began in July 2016 with the formation of a planning committee of stakeholders from residents and community organizations. This committee developed an outreach plan for the community to engage residents in a visioning meeting held on October 25, 2016. This meeting was attended by 200+ residents and gathered the communities ideas and vision through an exercise. Following the visioning meeting, the ideas were categorized and three smaller meetings were held in different subsections of the neighborhood. At these meetings, ideas were further discussed and refined and residents were asked to vote on key priorities.

In February 2017, subcommittees for each category of ideas were formed with members of the large planning committee and a resident serving as co-chairs of each subcommittee. Each subcommittee invited residents to join and organized their own meetings. All of the input collected from stakeholders was organized and distributed to the relevant committee. These committees took the ideas collected from community members and developed them into objectives and strategies for action. Many of the subcommittees performed additional community outreach to gain more input on the strategies. GCI provided technical assistance with data collection and analysis at the request of subcommittees. In January 2018, GCI presented a draft of the objectives and strategies that had been drafted so far to the planning committee for feedback, and subcommittees continued to work on refining their sections of the plan. A full draft of the plan incorporating subcommittee feedback was presented for planning committee feedback in September 2018. The final plan was released to the community in March 2019 and the general public in April 2019.

Back of the Yards Community Visioning Meeting. Source: Great Cities Insititute, 2017.