How We Work

MISSION

CPEX helps create highly functional, equitable communities throughout Louisiana that capitalize on their unique qualities through community-driven planning and implementation.

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CATEGORIES OF WORK

CPEX approaches our goals of community empowerment through three primary types of work:

• Dialogue and Education - Through outreach efforts such as our Smart Growth Summit, speaking engagements, and advocacy work, CPEX informs, excites, and involves citizens and community leaders.
• Tools and Resources - To capture and reuse the knowledge gained through planning and revitalization efforts, CPEX develops free best practices, toolkits, and guides for Louisiana communities to utilize (available on our website).
• Planning and Implementation - Through facilitation and coordination, CPEX offers process expertise to help communities develop and realize visions for growth at the ground level.

COMMUNITY PLANNING VALUE CHAIN

This diagram illustrates the cyclical process of planning and implementation. Because each phase requires unique roles and expertise, CPEX specializes in facilitating this process at a high level, while playing tactical roles throughout.

PROCESS EXPERTISE

With over 100 years of combined experience on our team, CPEX has mastered an efficient, inclusive planning process that is highly flexible to accommodate communities of various scales, demographics, and geographies. Our Community Planning Value Chain (above) is a simple framework to describe this process and the roles we play at each phase:

1. Vision - when a community coalesces around a desire to grow smarter. Typically this means inspired leadership, staff, and/or organized citizens have decided to take charge and fulfill their vision for the future. CPEX educates and promotes dialogue through literature, outreach, presentations, and events such as our Smart Growth Summit to encourage communities to gain vision.
2. Planning - the critical step where communities map out a comprehensive strategy for achieving their vision by working with planning experts across various disciplines and by actively soliciting public participation. During this phase, CPEX helps communities organize, assess needs, build capacity, leverage funding streams, objectively select third party experts, and reach out to the public for input, education and plan adoption.
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3. Policy - really the first step in implementation, enacting land use policies is a fundamental step in going from plan to implementation. CPEX not only has expertise in policy design, but we have also developed a set of free resources providing model codes and ordinances to be adapted for the needs of unique communities.
4. Implement - the long-term phase where many public and private projects over time move a community toward its vision. CPEX can play different roles in this phase depending on the scale of the community. We have programs for revitalization at the neighborhood level and tools 
for implementation at larger scales as well.
5. Maintain - as time passes and conditions change, communites must revisit and revise their plans based on progress and outcomes. CPEX builds strong relationships with the communities in which we work. By keeping the conversation alive, we make ourselves present and available as communities maintain their visions and plans.

COMMUNITIES AT ALL SCALES

In an ideal world, neighborhood plans would align seamlessly with town plans, which would fit in to parish and regional plans, etc., but in reality, plans are often not conducted in a logical or coordinated fashion. Because we work at all scales throughout Louisiana, CPEX benefits from a system perspective, and we are able to guide community planning in a way that is sensitive to the surrounding context.