LIAA Initiatives

LIAA has been awarded several significant grants focused on leveraging technology to help communities with education, community building, planning, inter-governmental cooperation and other issues. Here are a few significant programs:

Nature Hike

Listening to the River is a multi-disciplinary education project to engage students in the scientific exploration and digital documentation of their local watershed. It is funded by the National Science Foundation.

This program started in March, 2006 and is ongoing. For more information, please visit www.ListeningToTheRiver.org.

Planning Meeting

Partnerships for Change is a collaboration between several statewide organizations, including LIAA, to foster new and expanded cooperation between cities, townships and villages in developing and carrying out local land use policies that contribute to the preservation of cultural and natural resources. It is funded by several major Foundations and public sources.

This program started in December, 2004 and is ongoing. For more information, please visit www.PartnershipsForChange.cc.

Your Place

YourPlace will be an online magazine presenting impressions of the Grand Traverse Bay region in Michigan. Volunteers will provide research articles, opinion pieces, nature notes, planning web logs and more. Citizens will provide comments, favorite places and favorite pictures. The end product will be a web site that hopefully will inform the planning process in the region, but at least will give everyone a place to rave and rant about our beautiful region.

YourPlace is funded by a grant from the Americana Foundation. The first issue was published in June, 2006 and can be found at www.YourPlaceGrandTraverse.org.

Local Government Meeting

This project successfully demonstrated how emerging information technologies can support greater intergovernmental cooperation in land use planning through information sharing, computer-based analyses, and broad public participation. Initially, ITIC gathered citizens of five Michigan counties into volunteer teams to identify characteristics of their communities that they valued. At the same time, local governments within the county entered into information sharing agreements. This process led to a greater understanding of community assets, better inter-governmental cooperation and a web site, developed in LIAA's Community Center software, where everyone could join in.

This program was funded by several major foundations, and was completed in 2004. The web sites of the participating counties are still available: Hillsdale County, Leelanau County, Marquette County, Montcalm County and Van Buren County.

Building a Sense of Place

Completed in 1999, this was a three-year demonstration project conducted by LIAA and two other project partners, the Michigan Municipal League (MML) and the Michigan Chapter of the Nature Conservancy (TNC). The project built on LIAA’s experience in creating community information systems (CIS) for public use and our expertise in land use planning and resource management.

In each of six demonstration communities, LIAA

• lead a team of public officials and citizen volunteers through a series of community-building exercises
• helped community members document critical cultural and natural resources using geographic and multimedia data
• integrated the data into a CIS for public access through stand-alone systems or through local area network (LAN) applications
• provided extensive GIS support including data development, management, analyses, and map production
• provided training for continuing system maintenance

For more information, download a PDF version of the Building a Sense of Place final report.