Ventura County Civic Alliance > Fact Sheet

Engaging the Community For Our Future

The mission of the Ventura County Civic Alliance is to promote a healthy and sustainable future for the Ventura County region. The Alliance is a coalition of civic leaders with a shared commitment to bringing the Economic, Environmental, and Social Equity interests of our region together to address priority community issues, increase civic engagement and build community leadership.

Core Principles and Values

The Alliance holds a set of core beliefs that guide its mission: regional sustainability, open dialog, and collaboration, evenhandedness, community building and consensus decision-making. The Alliance promotes an approach that engages and encourages cooperative action. We bring together residents and civic organizations to explore options and find integrated solutions to the complex economic, environmental, and social challenges of our region. The Alliance plays a variety of community roles, including being a neutral convener and facilitator of regional forums; a think tank for policy development and objective, fact-based research; and a leader, organizer and catalyst of strategic initiatives. In every case, we are a vigorous champion of regional stewardship, and striving for the broadest possible representation and engagement in public policy discourse.

Regional Sustainability is the Civic Alliance’s priority issue. Since its inception in 2001, the Civic Alliance has been engaged in a broad-based community dialog aimed at achieving greater community awareness, clarity and consensus on the impacts of growth on our quality of life and strategies to move our region toward a more sustainable future. Hundreds of county residents and stakeholders have participated in workshops, forums, surveys, and the 2004 and 2005 Road Ahead conferences cosponsored by the Civic Alliance, the Ventura County Star and California State University Channel Islands.

Alliance Projects

Our products include the 2002 State of the Region indicators study, our 2004 study of regional growth plans, Connecting the Dots on Growth and Sustainability: What Do Current Trends Mean for Ventura County? And in 2005 Connecting the Dots II: The Call to Action– Strategies for Our Future, a series of white papers outlining key strategies for moving Ventura County toward a more sustainable future. All are available on our website at www.VenturaCountyCivicAlliance.org click on Alliance Projects. We are currently pursuing major initiatives that grew out of the Connecting the Dots project.

The Ventura County 2007 State of the Region Report released in May 2007 provides current data on 12 Quality of Life Indicators such as Economy, Education, Environmental Quality, Public Health, and Transportation among others. VCCA is continuing to provide presentations and distribute this report throughout Ventura County.

The Livable Communities Initiative is working with local governments and civic groups to increase understanding and support for integrating healthy and livable community principles into current land use and promote sustainable development decisions. The Livable Communities Working Group currently publishes a quarterly e-newsletter that features models of local development projects that adhere to the tenets of healthy and livable communities.

The Compact for a Sustainable Ventura County aims to work with community leaders and local governments to launch a process for community dialog and consensus-building on a vision for the county’s future, along with the establishment of a voluntary Compact containing the principles and policies needed for carrying out this vision. In partnership with Ventura Council of Governments and the Southern California Association of Governments, the Compact Working Group completed

Phase 1 of the Compact project in February of 2008. This phase focused on obtaining public input on various scenarios for accommodating future regional growth. We are now involved in the early stages of Phase 2, which will continue into 2010, and will involve a detailed study of specific policies and measurable standards needed for developing a draft Compact. Phase 3 will consider implementation.

Our Workforce Initiative seeks to build support across the “3E” communities for effective workforce education programs, particularly targeting key at-risk groups: youth, immigrants, displaced workers, and the underemployed. Our ultimate aim is to promote integrated economic and workforce development strategies that support community growth and sustainability goals and that offer all residents the opportunity to achieve a good quality of life for themselves and their families.

Organizational Structure and Leadership The Alliance is a community-based initiative of the Ventura County Community Foundation, funded by foundation and government grants and contributions from local individuals and institutions. The Alliance is composed of civic and business leaders from a broad and diverse cross-section of Ventura County, drawn from each of the ten cities of the county and from each of the three sectors whose interests must be balanced to support a sustainable community: Economy, Environment, and Social Equity.