Community Leadership Visit
For more than 28 years, a delegation of Springfield community leaders has traveled to a peer city, to learn from the experiences of another community and to bring back ideas that will benefit the Springfield region.
These visits have provided the opportunity to learn best practices from other cities in a wide range of areas, from downtown redevelopment and regional partnerships to education, workforce and diversity. In addition, these visits give the chance to interact with leaders in other parts of the country while also building and strengthening relationships in our own community.
There are many examples of the tangible benefits that have been brought to Springfield over the years by this program. This article looks at some of the most noteworthy.
You can also click on the links below to take a look back at each of our past visits.
Community Leadership Visit 2022
For our 27th Community Leadership Visit in 2021, we stayed home and "visited" our own community. What we learned strongly influenced the decision to visit Northwest Arkansas for the 2022 Community Leadership Visit.
While our community is excelling in many areas, this trip provided participants the opportunity to learn about brand identity, strong regional collaboration embraced by the public and private sector and area residents, brand identity around natural assets, talent attraction and retention, biking and the outdoor, the value of long-range regional planning and much more. The many parallels between Springfield and our neighbors to the south was a valuable takeaway that will help lead to future opportunities for community.