Best Practice

Best Practice

This award is for a specific planning tool, practice, program, project, or process. This category emphasizes results and demonstrates how innovative and state-of-the-art planning methods and practices help to create communities of lasting value.

Examples: Regulations and codes, tax policies or initiatives, growth management or design guidelines, transferable development rights programs, land acquisition efforts, public-private partnerships, applications of technology, handbooks, or efforts that foster greater participation in community planning.

Eligibility:

Any planning agency, planning team or firm, community group, or local authority helping civic leaders and citizens play a meaningful role in creating communities that enrich people's lives may submit a nomination. Nominated practice should have been completed in the last three (3) years before the nomination deadline.

Criteria:

• Originality and innovation — Document how your entry presents a visionary approach or innovative concept to address specific needs. Specify how planning principles have been observed, especially in consideration of your entry's effects on other public objectives.

• Implementation and transferability — Address what steps have been taken to build momentum and public support for your entry. Illustrate how your entry has potential application for others and how use of your entry's components and methodology would further the cause of good planning.

• Engagement — Explain how various public interests were involved and the extent of that involvement, including those who historically have been left out of the planning process. Show how your entry obtained public and private support. Clarify the role, significance, and participation of planners. Demonstrate the connection between the effort's success and increased awareness in the community of planners and planning.

• Effectiveness and results — State how your entry addressed the need or problem that prompted its initiation. Be explicit about how the results have made a difference in the lives of the people affected. Convey the level of effectiveness your entry can have over time.

• Diversity, Inclusion and Equity — Entries should demonstrate new or sustained commitment to the values of diversity, inclusion, equity and multiculturalism by documented efforts that go above and beyond the routine expectations of a project or program. Share how the diversity and inclusion-centered initiative has raised awareness and inclusion to create a more equitable community in the future.