The Conway student team and the town’s OSRP committee planned and conducted two community engagement workshops held in the Chesterfield Community Center. The meetings were publicized through the town website, Facebook, town-wide robo calls, flyers, and word-of-mouth. During the first meeting, held on February 4, 2023, over 40 residents shared and identified their open space and recreational concerns, interests, and needs, and discussed hopeful visions for the future.
Student project by Liam Gude ’23, Bindu Nicholson ’23, and Adam Stoumen ’23
Prepared for the Town of Chesterfield
The Open Space and Recreation Plan (OSRP) for the Town of Chesterfield updates and builds upon the previous OSRP written in 2003 as a guide for future open space and recreation planning. Twenty years later, Chesterfield’s presence in Western Massachusetts as a small-town, close-knit rural community, with an abundance of undeveloped gorgeous and ecologically sensitive land, has remained unchanged. At the same time, in many ways the town has changed, with new residents moving in and shifting priorities concerning open space and recreation. As such, the motivating factors for writing the OSRP encompass both preserving Chesterfield’s identity as an ecological jewel and speaking to contemporary open space and recreation issues.