A sustainable community means many things to the different people who live there. To business owners it means a healthy economy so that their businesses have a place in which to create and sell their products. To parents it means a safe environment in which to bring up their children. Everyone wants a secure, productive job to support themselves. Everyone needs clean air to breathe and clean water to drink.
Discovering the needs of the community and finding ways to meet those needs is not difficult but it does require some effort. It begins by deciding what your sustainable community would look like. There are as many different ways to create a vision as there are communities that have done so. What is most important is that the vision be created by the entire community: the well-to-do and those living in poverty, business owners and union workers, young and old. A number of organizations have developed guidebooks on how to get a sustainability project started. See the Recommendations section of this web site for more information about these materials.