Municipalities in the Yukon are required to update their Integrated Community Sustainability Plans (ICSPs) every five years and to update and align their Official Community Plans (OCPs) with the ICSPs.
ICSPs are comprehensive, long-term plans to guide communities toward their specific vision of a thriving, successful and sustainable future. It’s like a strategic plan for your community! Updating your ICSP every five years ensures that the community’s vision, goals and strategic directions reflect your community’s aspirations and that any changes in the external environment, including new challenges as well as opportunities, are addressed.
Aligning your OCP with the updated ICSP helps to ensure that local government policies best address and support the community’s vision and goals. The next step to ensuring that the community’s desires for the future translate into on-the-ground action is for municipalities to then create a corporate strategic plan. Best developed through a facilitated process involving staff and Council, the strategic plan will help focus limited resources on the best set of directions and actions necessary to begin moving toward the community vision and other corporate goals.
The Yukon Department of Community Services Gas Tax Fund can be used to develop and update ICSPs and OCPs. In addition, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) provides Sustainable Neighbourhood Action Plan (SNAP) grants to develop more specific neighbourhood-scale action plans. However, if your community is small, the grant could apply to the whole community. See following article regarding SNAP grants.
For more information please contact Shannon Gordon or call her on 604.906.0310