We love Unboxing Day. It’s the day when students receive their winter planning project documents from the publisher. While we print the fall and spring documents in-house, the planning documents are much larger and must be bound, so we send them out to a full-time publisher and they arrive early in the spring term.
When most people think of planning – if they think of it at all – they envision a dry profession full of endless bureaucracy and stakeholders arguing over policy and money. What they don’t see is what we do all winter long: Citizens trying to devise the best solutions for their communities; a thoughtful engagement that aims to provide opportunities for all voices to be heard; a research process that examines the accomplishments and sins of the past and the hopes and fears for the present; and the beauty that emerges when lines of data are creatively visualized. Students work with community partners on plans for climate resilience, food security, land conservation, transportation, recreation, housing, agriculture, and many other areas of focus. These documents become resource materials for individuals, municipalities and organizations, helping them decide which community initiatives to prioritize, and often providing the essential documentation they need to secure the funding sources required to implement them.
All Conway School projects have a clearly defined purpose for both student and client, and planning is a crucial piece of ecological design. It lives at the nexus of interpersonal relationships between humans and the relationships between humans and the rest of the dynamic world, and it can mean life or death for so many different types of communities.
As you can see, the students are very excited to see the results of all those months of hard work. The published documents are delivered to clients and archived at the school, where they serve as resources for future students and clients. To see examples of winter planning projects, you can visit our Issuu site.
