Chattanooga Venture transformed our community. It addressed many problems and created multiple organizations, including the Tennessee Aquarium and River City Company, using what became known as “The Chattanooga Way.” Then it disappeared and has been largely forgotten. How did it work? What made it so successful? And, why wasn’t it sustained?
The purpose of the Chattanooga Venturing Study Group is to learn about Venture, how it did what it did, and whether the Chattanooga Way might be useful today, to address current issues, using today’s technology. To date, we have hosted a series of speakers reflecting on Venture. What is next for the study group? This document summarizes options based on goals identified by group members.
For information about the speaker series, see https://luma.com/ChattanoogaVenturing. Watch videos of prior speakers at https://vimeo.com/showcase/11773651.
If you are interested in participating, let us know by filling out the interest form and/or subscribe to our email list.
The Chattanooga Venturing Study Group has reflected on how Chattanooga Venture was established and what it accomplished. If members of the group want this knowledge to be used, or at least not lost, some action is necessary. The four general options are to (1) continue the speaker series focusing on Venture’s results and ripple effects, (2) establish an online home for information about Chattanooga Venture and the Chattanooga Way, (3) conduct educational programs about them, and (4) apply the Chattanooga Way to today’s issues using today’s technologies.
What Was Chattanooga Venture?
Chattanooga Venture was a private initiative and organization that operated between 1984 and 1994. As stated in the original brochure, Chattanooga Venture was:
- An open association of citizens
- A partnership of all interests in the community
- A channel for exchanging information
- A means for focusing the collective energy of the community
- A tool for solving problems and setting directions for the future
And the stated intentions were for Venture to:
- Establish a permanent process of citizen involvement in decision-making
- Provide an open forum for citizens’ ideas
- Mediate conflicts
- Initiate community improvement projects
- Promote opportunity
Chattanooga Venture was the prototype for what might generally be called community venturing—people collaborating to improve their community in a comprehensive, inclusive, and sustainable manner.
How Chattanooga Venture Worked
The two key attributes of the Chattanooga Way are (1) goals set by participants via (2) collaborative learning. There was no pre-defined agenda or set of issues to address. Instead, the people set the agenda during two rounds of visioning structured around five categories:
- People: Human resources – living and learning
- Places: Our environment – preserving and developing
- Work: The economy – growing and changing
- Play: Leisure/recreation/the arts – enjoying and doing
- Government: Public resources – leading and serving
Through the Chattanooga Way, Venture’s first round of visioning, Vision 2000, resulted in over 40 goals that generated over 30 separate, often very substantial, results, listed on page 6. Chattanooga Venture, we have learned, did these things by having:
- A bank of trained facilitators to support the process
- A simple, flexible, fair process for gathering input
- A team of "connected champions" leading the effort
- Active support and buy-in from those in control of resources
- Open, quasi-public spaces
- Small to large group public goal setting
- Task forces for goals
What Venture did:
- Acquire active support from key stakeholders, particularly local civic leaders and philanthropists
- Communicate broadly and proactively about purpose and process
- Connect with and study other communities
- Engage community members where they were
- Establish a prioritized portfolio of goals
- Focus on tangible outcomes/results
- Get analyses and ideas from outside experts
- Identify for models for solutions
- Organize task forces to work on goals
Missing Elements
Venture accomplished amazing results because it strengthened community capabilities then tapped them. It was unprecedented and truly innovative. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't perfect and missed several elements that are now commonly consider important for participatory planning.
Venture did not methodically map local assets, which could be very important for community venturing. Today, asset mapping is widely used in community development.1 Venture led to the creation of multiple organizations that greatly benefited many people and provided incredible return on public and private investments. But it did not maintain equity in those organizations. Indeed, Venture’s “spin-outs” became completely disconnected from it and each other. New frameworks from various sectors might be applied to improve the Chattanooga Way, notably agile/lean, collective impact, and design thinking.
We are just now recognizing these missing elements because key participants and stakeholders have not reflected on Venture, what it did and how it did it until now. Reflection is the critical final step in the learning process, clarifying lessons, integrating them into prior knowledge, and laying the foundation for additional learning.
Learning about the Chattanooga Way
What Venture did do very intentionally and methodically was learn. The entire initiative was about building capacity, connecting people for shared understanding, and figuring out what works by trying various approaches and tactics. Could the Chattanooga Way have been sustained as an on-going process if there had been collective reflection earlier? It’s impossible to say but we can now consider a path forward based on what we have learned. We can relearn the Chattanooga Way, use it to map asset and generate equity via new possibilities.
1For more information on asset mapping, see https://www.cifor-icraf.org/abcd/ and https://visiblenetworklabs.com/2025/04/09/what-is-community-asset-mapping/.