A C I V I C H E A L T H C O N S U L T I N G F I R M
Hope isn’t a strategy for improving your community. If you want to realize change, you’re going to have to take action.
Revitalize or Die founder Jeff Siegler has assisted hundreds of communities with their revitalization, economic sustainability and community development.
Utilizing a background in urban planning, downtown district management, revitalization, real estate, economics and organizational development, his diverse background and expertise lends a unique vantage point for addressing community concerns.
How We Help
As a civic pride consultancy, we can assist your efforts in shifting the trajectory of your town. Apathy doesn’t have to run rampant, and with some effort, people can once again be proud of the place they call home.
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Apathy is the source of nearly every community problem, and until it is addressed, progress is impossible. No amount of planning or funding can make people care about their community. In this phase, we will have frank and honest conversations about a community’s struggles, so we can begin to understand what challenges lie ahead.
Communities are a collection of people, businesses and all the common spaces in between. The success of every entity in a community is dependent on the place in which they all share. It does, after all, take a village.
This process brings together community stakeholders to have honest conversations about what it takes to revitalize and develop a consensus vision about what people want and what it will take to get there. From this new collective effort, we will work together to create a sustainable, community based organization to oversee the revitalization process.
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The road to revitalization failure is paved with good intentions. We make the mistake of believing we have to ask less of volunteers in hopes of attracting a larger pool. This is the quickest way to ensure a board built on apathy.
Revitalization is the most important thing we can do for our communities and therefore we must demand so much more from our volunteers. We must build a badass board from the best and the brightest. We must become a community of doers.
By evaluating board roles and responsibilities and developing a new set of expectations, we will set appropriate standards that meet the high expectation your mission demands.
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The process of improving requires rallying residents to action and connecting expertise to opportunity. During this phase, we bring residents together around previously identified initiatives and coordinate outside experts to bring their particular skill sets to the community.
The mission of your revitalization organization has the ability to affect every single person in the community, but all too often those mission statements go unmet. It’s time to align your aspirations with your actions and start doing the work your organization is capable of and the community desperately needs.
By taking a candid approach to strategic planning, we cut out wasted time and effort and get to the point. Through this process we will assess if your mission statement is appropriate, and update it if needed. We will identify short-term goals and long-term aspirations. We will decide who is in charge of each identified project and align accountability measures to ensure the work gets carried out.
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Apathy is always waiting in the shadows to take hold again. It is critical that a community is vigilant in terms of maintaining its new standards and ensure this doesn’t happen. This phase is recognition that a community has successfully achieved recovery and is working to protect that progress.
T H E F O U R S T A G E S
How healthy is your community?
Are you curious to discover the civic health status of your town or city? Take our free Civic Health Assessment to find out where you rank, and learn about resources that can help you begin to improve areas of concern.
The Founder
Jeff Siegler has assisted hundreds of communities with their revitalization, economic sustainability and community development.
Utilizing a background in urban planning, downtown district management, revitalization, real estate, economics and organizational development, Jeff’s diverse background and expertise lends a unique vantage point for addressing community concerns.
The Workbook
Your city isn't dying because of Walmart or the highway bypass or "the economy." It's dying because you stopped caring enough to do anything about it, and so did everyone else. That's a hard thing to hear. It's also true, and pretending otherwise has yet to fix a single Main Street.
The Civic Health Workbook walks you through why your community lost its self-respect, why residents feel embarrassed instead of proud, and why no state program or consultant parachuting in for a weekend is ever going to fix that for you. Then it helps you get to work: raising standards, sharpening aesthetics, rebuilding the kind of community bonds that make people actually want to stick around, and taking ownership of a place instead of just occupying it.
The Book
Our great strength as human beings is our ability to adapt to our surroundings, but what if those surroundings are unhealthy? Our places dictate the people we become, the friends we make, and our health and happiness. We are shaped by our places 24/7 and it’s time we flip the table and give as much thought to the places that shape our lives as we do the ingredients we consume.
Ultimately, it is the places in which we exist that will dictate the people we will be. In understanding this, we can begin to grasp how important it is to shape those places accordingly.
