The Community’s Plan adopted the name Community Alliance a few months ago. Now Steve Hamilton, the new chairman of the Community’s Alliance board, wants to move the city’s pulse-taking consortium into a new era of better focus.

“What we are trying to do is find out, in a collaborative effort with all the stakeholders in town, what can we do, what we need to do, what realistically we can do and how do we build a collaborative effort around these things that are critically important to St. Joe,” he said.

Mr. Hamilton said previous Community’s Plan surveys identified education, job growth and livability as three areas of importance to the community. And in each area we’ve identified our strengths and weaknesses.

Future Community Alliance goals are to hire an executive director and create a series of public forums to better gain input on the community’s needs.

“Our goal is to have some vision conferences where people can come in and sit down and talk and express those things rather than hire somebody to go out and make a few phone calls,” Mr. Hamilton said. “The last thing we want to do is say ‘This is what you guys need to do.’ That’s not the goal of the Alliance. The goal of the Alliance is to say, ‘What does our community need?’”

The Community Alliance is comprised of a funding partnership of seven leading community institutions: Buchanan County, the city of St. Joseph, the Convention & Visitors Bureau, Heartland Health, Missouri Western State University, the St. Joseph School District and the St. Joseph Area Chamber of Commerce.

The Community Alliance was created in 2000 as Great Things Happen in Greater St. Joseph, to identify what city residents needed and desired to make the community better. This information was gathered through a community survey, which in turn would be used to help the city and local businesses make better decisions affecting the community.

Alonzo Weston can be reached

at alonzow@npgco.com.