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Community comes together to implement IMPACT Independence County

What makes a great place to live? That’s just the question the Batesville Area Chamber of Commerce, Lyon College and the University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville sought to answer in July 2015, when they brought together more than 300 county residents to discuss the creation of IMPACT Independence County, a strategic community plan.

“The purpose of IMPACT was to develop and implement a community vision to get everybody in line going one direction, improving quality of life, quality of place and economic opportunities for everybody in the county — not just Batesville,” said Kyle Christopher, tourism director for the chamber. After the meeting, plan leaders surveyed community residents to determine what areas needed improvement.

Based on about 1,200 responses, IMPACT leaders identified four main focus areas: economic prosperity, tourism, educational excellence, and healthy living and well-being. Jamie Rayford, the chamber’s chief operating officer, said the process was a grassroots effort.

“We believe that our citizens have the right to strive to create the environment that they desire, and if you don’t ever give them an opportunity to dream and create and think about what they want the place they live in to be like, then essentially, you’re going to have a lot of conflict and controversy among people,” she added. “We felt like this was the best way to plan our preferred future that everyone could accept and that everyone would feel like they were a part of and that had something for them in it.”

A subcommittee oversees each focus area, and the committees are already making strides toward meeting community goals. Independence County never had a formal tourism program until IMPACT led to the creation of the tourist-director position, Christopher said, adding that the Tourism Committee helped pass an advertising and promotion tax in January.

“You can set goals, but if you don’t have a funding source, that’s typically all they are — just goals — and it’s very hard to ever meet them,” he said, “but now we have a funding source, we have a future, and the future is very bright for Batesville and Independence County.”

Those working on IMPACT goals can also apply for mini grants funded by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, he added.

The community provided a number of ideas about educational advancement, including formation of a public-education foundation to raise funds for public schools and the creation of Independence Promise, which would provide funding for high school graduates to attend Lyon College or UACCB.

The Educational Excellence Committee is exploring the feasibility of such a plan, including costs and ways to benefit graduates who would rather pursue technical programs or apprenticeships, Rayford said.

In terms of health, community ideas ranged from expanded health care services to accessible recreational trails. In order to meet those goals, the Healthy Living and Wellness Subcommittee is organizing a healthy living and well-being summit that will bring together all related organizations in Independence County.

“That summit will, first and foremost, bring together all of these different providers of services and care, and start to work toward transparency, understanding what each of them does in its own right, understanding where the gaps are and connecting a large communications network so we can all talk and know what each other is doing,” Rayford said. “That way, we can be more aligned in what we start to tackle.”

Fostering collaboration between organizations in the county is the key to long-term improvements, she added, and in fact, each part of the IMPACT plan is connected to the others.

“All these pieces work together very functionally,” she said. “People who like to come and visit your community through tourism, they’re able to realize all the things that are there, and then that, of course, wings around in the cycle of people who want to move here and live here, so there’s positive growth from that.”

The full plan is available at

We felt like this was the best way to plan our preferred future that everyone could accept and that everyone would feel like they were a part of and that had something for them in it.” — JAMIE RAYFORD BATESVILLE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER

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