Today I am working on the Community Baseline, as I was yesterday, and I will be tomorrow. It is the first part of the Long Term Community Recovery Plan we will be submitting the compilation of my team’s planning efforts in Vermilion Parish. I have created worksheets for the other experts in my team to complete; providing me with hard numbers on economic development, environmental and coastal impacts, human services, transportation and infrastructure, and housing and community development. Today I’m working on the Needs Assessment based on their input. Yesterday I completed a draft of the “What Happened?” section. Tomorrow I hope to have a process prepared for team members to sit down, articulate, evaluate, and prioritize project goals and proposed programs. Prior to that I was just trying to figure out what was going on by reading, talking to people, attending meetings, and touring places. Now I’m finally working and producing the intelligence that will enable this planning process to move forward.

One observation from yesterday’s work. In writing this I’m tasked with getting some hard numbers and figuring them into an articulate and concise narrative. I spend less time actually writing than I do actually nailing down these hard numbers. The numbers come from somewhere, or maybe they don’t exist yet, or are hard to find, or perhaps are taken for granted when they ultimately are sourced from anecdotes. I’m remembering a lesson from planning grad school that planner’s have to make decisions and recommendations on incomplete data.

Apologies to friends and relatives who are hoping to find new postings every day. I want to and I think I will even have multiple postings a day like some of my favorite blogs. But maybe not. Blogging aspirations are choked by mundane and practical concerns. But I’m working through them, so I think I’ll be posting more often.

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

• View all posts by Aharon N. Varady →
• website
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+

“Long Term Community Recovery” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.