The Community Priorities Forum & Survey results are in!

On Saturday, January 24, the CNA hosted a Community Priorities Forum at City Hall to learn what issues are most important to them, and their ideas on how to address them. These ideas will inform the upcoming application cycle for Neighborhood Matching Grants, and future neighborhood organizing.

More than 150 people attended and we heard great ideas to improve food access, strengthen community resilience, improve pedestrian safety, create “third spaces” for people to gather and sharing resources like tool libraries, and may more. You can find all the results here – https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1iGdsAghXZ5_YtDkhjyew2sjMYgnXKSEb?usp=drive_link

• A high-level summary of the survey results (143 respondents).
• A more detailed summary, which includes specific project ideas, themes from open-ended responses, and counts of how often certain ideas were mentioned.
• Neighborhood-level priority summaries, organized by the neighborhood respondents identified, so each RNA can see how people living within their boundaries responded.
• The Community Priorities Forum meeting notes, which capture the themes and discussion that came up during the in-person event. 

The survey summary combines the ranked priority data with demographic patterns to highlight not just what people identified as most important, but also who is most affected and how priorities vary based on lived experience.

A few topline takeaways to flag:

• Food Access & Basic Needs and Emergency Preparedness & Community Resilience emerged as the most consistently high priorities, with over 60% of respondents ranking each in their Top 3.
• Affordability & Access and Safety & Livability followed closely behind, often tied to very concrete, place-based concerns like housing costs, sidewalks, crossings, and transportation.
• Demographic patterns suggest that priorities are shaped by lived experience – age, housing status, and neighborhood conditions influence which needs feel most urgent.
• Responses in the “Other” category largely reinforced the existing priority areas, indicating that the categories captured what mattered most to respondents overall.

Taken together, these materials are intended to be shared tools, not prescriptive documents – a way to ground our conversations in what community members told us directly.