Volunteers in the Platteville community have been working together to collect six big ideas to improve the Platteville area.

The project, known as My Community My Vision, began in June of 2007 and collected over 450 ideas from members of the community. A selection committee evaluated and chose ideas they felt would impact Platteville most, Ralph Kluseman, project manager, said.

“When determining how to narrow the ideas, it was what ideas grabbed imagination at large,” Kluseman said.

The six ideas included Eco-Municipality, making Platteville a green community; building a community center that would include sports, arts, retail and meeting spaces; an easy access community to complete and upgrade paths, sidewalks, trails and streets; an IDEA Center that would be used as a hub for new retail businesses to be developed; an annual regional festival that will incorporate music, food, arts, diversity and national and international entertainment; and forming a Platteville community communication network to bring together all media partners and put all information pertaining to Platteville in one central location, Kluseman said.

“Visioning is not that difficult, it just takes time to do it. It is good because it raises expectations and creates stakeholders for the community,” Kluseman said. “It gets individuals to stop talking and start doing.”

Other communities have been successful with My Community My Vision and, in each case, a family, individual or group of individuals funded the project.

“No one will be going out to ask for donations,” Kluseman said. “The idea is that the visions will be so well formatted and thought out that someone will step up and want to create a legacy.”

Anyone interested in the project can be involved, Linda Metzger, owner of Badger Brothers Coffee LLC and student, said.

“The community is a big part of campus,” Frank Moullet, Student Senate president and member of the steering committee, said. “It’s good for the community to have college students involved and it’s good for students to get more experienced with Platteville and might help students to consider Platteville as a home after school.”

Picking people to be involved with this project was important because we wanted to get people from all different areas and backgrounds so our mission statement will appeal to more demographics, Metzger said.

“It’s wonderful to have young people in the community and the My Community My Vision will help to bridge the gaps in the community,” Metzger said.

“We want to do a better job to provide an infrastructure to get people to come back,” Kluseman said. “So when students leave to live in a big city after school, they think of coming back to Platteville when they are ready to settle down and raise a family because of what our community has to offer.”