With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and in partnership with the Flatbush Development Corporation, MAS created a demonstration project: Imagine Flatbush 2030 to bridge the gap between PlaNYC’s sustainability goals and consensus-driven community-based planning. Over the past year, the MAS Planning Center has worked with residents, business owners, youth, community leaders, social service providers, and clergy in Flatbush, Brooklyn to assist them in creating a neighborhood sustainability and livability agenda, and tools to measure progress toward consensus-based goals.

More than 300 people participated in four separate workshops to identify and prioritize a diverse range of issues and goals that participants saw as important to maintaining a sustainable Flatbush.

Over the course of the summer and early fall, the Municipal Art Society and local partner organizations in Flatbush have taken these issues, broken them down, and shaped them into an agenda for local action. The agenda is really a collection of targeted opportunities to make progress on local sustainability, in addition to identifying ways to measure progress. The action agenda is designed to assist Flatbush residents work effectively with local groups, elected officials, and city agencies to make progress toward community development goals. Here’s a sampling of what’s in it:

• Developing leadership among business owners;
• Making sure that land use applications for new development are compatible with sustainability goals;
• Creating a central source of information on all training and programming opportunities that serve local youth;
• Creating design guidelines that promote harmony between old and new buildings.

To make it simple to view and use the Imagine Flatbush 2030 resources, the MAS Planning Center has created an online application (or widget) with links to several documents and timely information about progress toward implementing the Imagine Flatbush 2030 Sustainability Agenda. Please explore this new tool — feedback is most welcome. We encourage you to use it, circulate it, and certainly consider incorporating it into your own website, blog, or future posts about Flatbush; but please contact us first for detailed instructions at jcosorio@mas.org or at 212-935-3960 (ext.254.) And of course, you can get information about becoming more involved anytime by contacting the Flatbush Development Corporation www.fdconline.org or Sustainable Flatbush at www.sustainableflatbush.org/participate.