How to read this plan

The five chapters

The chapters are the values of Plan 26, created and adopted by the plan’s steering committee.

• Bring people together. We build relationships across neighborhoods, cultures, and generations, because collaboration is how we grow.
• Make space for everyone. We design programs and partnerships that welcome a wide range of voices, needs, and ways of showing up.
• Imagine what’s possible. We embrace creativity, curiosity, and bold thinking, turning ideas into impact.
• Celebrate along the way. We create moments of connection and delight, because joy is part of the work, not just the outcome.
• Nurture what’s next. We invest time, care, and energy into the people, ideas, and opportunities that will shape the Roanoke of tomorrow.

Every recommendation sits in exactly one chapter, placed by the barrier it removes rather than by what it is about. A mural program is not automatically public art. If the problem a respondent named was that nothing ever happens where she lives, her mural goes under the chapter about access, not the chapter about making.

The three levels underneath

Priority. The 21 concerns respondents named.

Policy. The 62 rules the City follows when a decision comes up. 

Action Items. The 227 specific steps needed to support what respondents asked for.

One sentence, all the way down

A respondent wrote this:

Please create a Google Calendar one can sign up for to know about the activities in Roanoke Arts. It’s hard to learn where the meetings happen.

Not being able to find out what is happening is a connection problem, so that sentence lands in Bring people together. It joins 25 other respondents who raised the same concern, which becomes Priority 1, one place to find out what’s happening. The rule the City commits to is the policy: maintain a single, current, public source of information about arts and cultural activity in Roanoke, including the City’s own arts meetings, deadlines, and decisions. The first action item under it is the initial step: establish and maintain one public arts calendar, free to list on and free to use.

What adopting this plan commits the City to

Adopting a plan is not appropriating money. A policy commits the City to a direction about what we do when the question comes up. 

What each step costs, who carries it, and when it happens live in a separate implementation companion that staff update annually. City Plan 2040 made the same split, keeping its implementation material at PlanRoanoke.org, which allows the adopted document to be short enough to read in one sitting, and it keeps a ten-year plan from being frozen to a one-year budget.

A note on the quotations

Every quoted sentence in this plan is somebody’s real sentence, wording and spelling left as they wrote it. Nothing was composed to illustrate a point. If you filled out the survey, yours may be in here.