Our Mission: To support the creation and maintenance of sustainable and vibrant communities and regions through the application of innovative decision making tools and methods.
PlaceMatters believes in informed, effective, and equitable citizen engagement. We work to ensure that communities and organizations design and implement processes that garner broad public involvement and support, educate participants, and lead to sustainable, livable communities.
PlaceMatters achieves these goals by:
- Using novel public engagement techniques
- Employing innovative decision-support tools
- Integrating ecosystem based management and community planning through our Bridging the Divide program
- Ensuring better understanding of tradeoffs during decision-making
- Sharing outcomes of on-the-ground projects with others in the field through our conferences and website
PlaceMatters' History
PlaceMatters was conceived of during the Tools for
Community Design and Decision Making (TCDDM) workshops, organized by Ken Snyder six times between 1998 to 2005. These workshops served as a gathering point for
community practitioners, tools providers, and public agencies and
foundations to establish more effective ways of determining the future
of communities. To this end, TCDDM organizers and participants sought
to build an enduring organization to greatly increase the resources for
and impact of this work. With the help of an executive steering
committee made of TCDDM participants, Ken Snyder launched
PlaceMatters.com as a program of Civic Results in 2002.
For three years, PlaceMatters provided in-depth technical assistance and public process design, technical audits and tools recommendations to various projects at the community and regional scale. In 2005, PlaceMatters staff became the Planning Tools branch of the Orton Family Foundation. While with the Foundation, PlaceMatters staff worked to encourage and explore the innovative use of tools in community participation, planning, and design.
In early 2007, PlaceMatters was re-created through a spin-off from the Orton Family Foundation. PlaceMatters is now an independent 501(c)3 organization supporting the creation and maintenance of sustainable and vibrant communities and regions through the application of innovative decision-making tools and methods.
