Sunday, January 13, 2008

FCA History

Overview

The mission of the Farragut Community Alliance (FCA) is to bring Farragut citizens, neighborhoods, and organizations together in a collaborative effort to help provide the future vision and plan for the community of Farragut, to prepare Farragut for the future, and to provide leadership and educational programs.


It is the philosophy of FCA to always to have a "grassroots" type of culture and to operate in such a manner that is collaborative and entrepreneurial in nature while maintaining fiscal conservative efforts through volunteer and in-kind support.


Objectives


The objectives of the Farragut Community Alliance are:


• To provide a collaborative voice in the community
• To increase citizen participation and offer other opportunities
• To promote and build the Farragut brand
• To educate the community on topics that is impacting it
• To develop the future leaders of the community
• To work in conjunction with the Town in making Farragut a prestigious community
• To ensure the schools in the community remain competitive
• To provide forums and host roundtables for neighborhoods, organizations, and businesses
• To identify and address community needs


History


The Farragut Community Alliance is a real life “grass roots” story:


In 2001, a group of individuals started chatting on the Farragut Ingles shopping center’s sidewalk about a variety of subjects including business, neighborhoods, city planning, safety, education, quality of life, and the characteristics of great towns and cities across the country. These individuals met in passing over the next two years and chatted about the same subjects. During this same time period, they started to really examine the community they worked, lived, and/or relaxed in and also expanded their interests to other individuals.


After the 2003 Farragut elections, the group started to gather to specifically talk about these subjects at the Ingles shopping center, at local restaurants, and individual homes. All of these individuals realized that there was a critical need to establish a new group in the Farragut community to address the areas that were not being addressed or ignored by other organizations. In 2004, the group took the initiatives to start it down the path of becoming a formal organization. This group also utilized University of Tennessee MBA students to benchmark other communities and their leadership programs.


The end result was that the Farragut Community Alliance and Leadership Farragut program were launched in 2004. It was the belief of the FCA leaders to take a slow approach in incubating the organization and followed a simple strategy of "crawl - walk - run". This strategy has worked well to date and has helped FCA continually grow in brand and size.


The original core group included: Walt Chan, Bill Johns, Margaret Johns, Leslie Julian, and Paul Mees. Today, some of the faces have changed, but the vision still lives on.