Partners for Rogers Park News

PRP Annual Meeting and Quality of Life Survey

Urban Coaster

Partners for Rogers Park is an all volunteer group of organizations and individuals within the Rogers Park community who are committed to work collaboratively towards a more diverse and equitable Rogers Park. We strive to provide a space for residents and community leaders to come together on a monthly basis and discuss neighborhood happenings and hopefully produce synergy and positive movement around issues of concern within Rogers Park.

The major initiative for the coalition in 2009 is to undertake a community wide planning process. This process will employ a stakeholder based approach to community development at the center of which is the belief that the residents of a community best know its own needs and should have input in both the successes and failures.

This process will be comprised of a series of community meetings around specific topics including education, housing, safety, youth and healthcare in addition to smaller focus groups with selected residents. The purpose of these meetings is to gather as much substantive feedback from residents about what they would like the Rogers Park community to become in the coming years.

We have created an online survey as a jumping off point for this process and we hope residents will take 5 minutes to complete it. The survey asks residents to rate the quality of local services, schools, housing and other items while also giving residents the opportunity to list the reasons they love this community and why they chose to make this neighborhood their home. The online survey can be found at http://www.surveymonkey.com/.

Once this community garnered data is completed; the information will be used to set priorities for PRP as well as to outline projects that can be worked on as a community. Our goal for our community planning initiative is to provide outlets not only for community concerns but to also try and use some of the collected energy to tackle issues in a collaborative way.

We are also having the annual meeting for Partners for Rogers Park at Gale Park on March 18th from 6-7:30pm where we will elect our Steering Committee which is the governing body for our coalition. It will also be a time for interested residents to meet with current membership and learn about the work that our various committees are currently undertaking in addition to outlining ways residents can become involved. We are currently expanding membership and are looking to bring new community residents into our coalition that are invested in making Rogers Park a more dynamic and vibrant place to live.