As communities grow, so too do challenges and opportunities.

For over 40 years, individuals, organizations, and agencies have used CDR’s facilitators to help navigate planning processes. We help decision-makers find collaborative solutions that address the challenges caused by growth and change, and that maximize opportunities for improving their communities.

We provide stakeholder engagement and facilitation to make planning and development processes holistic, inclusive, and collaborative.

Planning–master, strategic, comprehensive, area planning–and development–urban and community–brings stakeholders together to solve problems around resources, infrastructure, housing, and transportation. Planning brings a future-oriented lens that promotes creativity and innovation to envision change, collaboratively.

Where we add value in planning projects: 

  • Visioning: setting goals and objectives, defining milestones and success metrics 
  • Consensus building: building stakeholder support around a shared vision 
  • Themes: identifying themes and priorities to shape a shared plan 
  • Implementation: moving talk into action with practical, useful, and feasible implementation planning

Examples of our planning work: 

  1. Thornton Comprehensive Plan
    CDR provided facilitation and community outreach services for Thonrton’s Comprehensive Planning Process. Services included: coordination and facilitation of a visioning process with input from City Council and a broad cross-section of the community to identify high-level vision statements and provide a framework for the Comprehensive Plan Rewrite; and facilitation and coordination of community outreach and engagement services to ensure perspectives from a diverse cross-section of the community were included in the Comprehensive Plan Rewrite.
  2. RTD Rail Trail Master Planning Process, Boulder County Transportation Department
    Spanning 9 miles from Boulder, CO, to Erie, CO, is a deactivated rail line owned by the Regional Transit District (RTD). RTD agreed to allow Boulder County’s Transportation Department to conduct a master planning process on the corridor to design a soft-surface, mulit-use trail along the corridor. CDR is leading the public involvement and agency coordination of this planning process. CDR designed the stakeholder engagement plan, serves as the primary point of contact for stakeholders, is designing public involvement activities (ranging from stakeholder interviews to invite-only neighborhood workshops, to large public meetings), and facilitating internal, multi-agency decision-making meetings. In addition to robust in-person public involvement activities, CDR broadens engagement by including technical applications, such as an interactive website and text and email notifications.
  3. Colorado Springs Parks Department Strategic Planning
    CDR worked closely with the Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Services (PRCS) Department at the City of Colorado Springs to identify the department’s goals and objectives, mission, vision, and values. CDR assisted the department in identifying a master task list to implement the strategic plan. In 2018, PRCS leadership began a process of reviewing the master task list as well as the strategic plan elements. Over the course of four facilitated meetings, CDR helped leadership identify next steps and how to continue to move the strategic plan forward.

Learn more:

Jeffrey Range
Planning Practice Lead
jrange@mediate.org