‘Our Strategic Plan’<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cAnyone who thinks people will respond to a survey vastly, vastly overestimates,\u201d says Michael Stankov \u201917 (CLAS) \u201918 MS, an environmental planner and inland wetlands agent for the town of Mansfield. \u201cPeople don’t like surveys. They don’t do them.\u201d<\/p>\n But if you can effectively encourage people to take them, surveys still represent a good way to get valuable information and feedback from a large number of people.<\/p>\n Which is why Stankov and his supervisor, Jennifer Kaufman \u2013 Mansfield\u2019s director of planning and development \u2013 have spent a good portion of the past six months developing, promoting, and encouraging participation in a town-wide survey to help support the 2025 update to Mansfield\u2019s plan of conservation and development.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery town in Connecticut needs to update their plan of conservation and development, and that has to be done every 10 years,\u201d explains Kaufman. \u201cIn Mansfield, our plan of conservation and development also serves as our strategic plan. Not only does it include items such as land use, where we want to grow, and what we want to preserve, it also includes other things, like budgetary considerations for our town council.\u201d<\/p>\n Mansfield\u2019s last strategic plan, developed in 2015, is a wide-ranging 458-page document known as Mansfield Tomorrow<\/a>, and it lays out priorities for the town that range from the amenities that influence people choosing to live in Mansfield to the economic and physical development of the community.<\/p>\n The 2025 plan isn\u2019t meant to be a complete rewrite, but rather an update that reflects changes in priorities and strategies that will naturally occur over the course of a decade, Kaufman says. An ad hoc committee as well as three working groups have been active since last fall, garnering feedback from the Mansfield community to help contribute to the update.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have the town-wide survey that we’ve sent out,\u201d Kaufman says. \u201cWe’ve done a mailing to everyone that has a mailbox in town. We\u2019re having a public workshop. We’re going to the Senior Center for pop-up events. I’m going to the library\u2019s story time, the library\u2019s game night. We’re going to be doing door-to-door door hangers.<\/p>\n \u201cSo, we feel like we’ve got the town’s community engagement, the town’s people.\u201d<\/p>\n But the engagement they haven\u2019t really been able to get?<\/p>\n It\u2019s from UConn.<\/p>\n ‘Very Intentional’<\/strong><\/p>\n In the fall of 2025, UConn Storrs will house an estimated 13,800 students, Kaufman explains, and under census guidelines, those students residing on campus at UConn are considered Mansfield residents.<\/p>\n \u201cIn addition, besides people who are living in on-campus housing, we have about 4,000 students who live in the community in apartments, in single-family homes, and in condos,\u201d she says. \u201cSo, the UConn population, while they only live in our town for four years, they’re a key part of the population. And they’re not necessarily plugged in to come to a town meeting, or they may not be using our library, or coming to our Mansfield Community Center, or going to the Senior Center.\u201d<\/p>\n And even beyond the students who live on and around the Storrs campus, there are thousands of additional members of the UConn community \u2013 including faculty and staff \u2013 who commute to Mansfield; who visit the downtown area; who enjoy Mansfield restaurants or frequent Mansfield businesses; or who make use of Mansfield\u2019s parks, trails, and recreation services.<\/p>\n The town wants to hear from those people, too.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s all too easy to fragment our lives into \u2013 ‘I live in a town and that’s the only town that I should have input in,’\u201d says Stankov. \u201cBut we live in communities that are complex and that cross lots of towns, so we need to hear what people who don’t just live and pay taxes here want, because that helps us understand how to provide more services for more people.\u201d<\/p>\n But while UConn represents more than half Mansfield\u2019s population, engagement from UConn in the 2015 strategic planning process wasn\u2019t what Kaufman and Stankov would hope, and they want to change that this time around.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’re trying to be very intentional about our outreach to the UConn population,\u201d Kaufman says. \u201cWe need to kind of crack that nut of how we can reach out to the UConn community.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBecause of our weak penetration of the UConn bubble in 2015, we\u2019ve really doubled down on trying to make sure that we understand what folks at UConn are thinking of,\u201d says Stankov.<\/p>\n But how do you get busy students \u2013 not to mention faculty and staff, who might not even live in town \u2013 to pay attention to and take a municipal survey?<\/p>\n That\u2019s where 18 undergraduates from Innovation House are playing an important part.<\/p>\n ‘What Students Think’<\/strong><\/p>\n Innovation House is a multidisciplinary community that brings together entrepreneurial-minded students and offers mentorship opportunities and exposure to programs that help support entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n That multidisciplinary nature is what drew Alishia Thompson \u201927 (SFA), a digital media and design student from Putnam, to the community.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted a mix of a bunch of different people from different majors and schools in the University and from all sorts of different backgrounds,\u201d Thompson says.<\/p>\n Michael Bossi \u201927 (BUS), a business management major from Bristol, was drawn to the community through an interest in innovation and entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n \u201cI love thinking strategically about business and really just any kind of problem that you have to think critically to solve,\u201d Bossi says. \u201cThat’s just always what’s been fun to me. That’s why I went into business management in the first place as well, and that led me to the Innovation House this past year.\u201d<\/p>\n For Carter Gay \u201927 (CLAS), a double major in mathematics and physics from Canton, Innovation House seemed to align with his interests.<\/p>\n \u201cYou get to be part of a community of people, and they all live on the same floor,\u201d Gay says. \u201cI thought that was kind of cool. In the building where the housing is, there\u2019s a maker\u2019s space in the bottom, that\u2019s pretty cool.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite their difference in majors, the three students \u2013 and many of their fellow sophomores in Innovation House \u2013 have something in common beyond their interest in innovation.<\/p>\n None of them had ever really thought much about municipal planning.<\/p>\n Last year, the Werth Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation<\/a> took over responsibility for the Innovation House Learning Community. Kathy Rocha, the institute\u2019s associate director, and Katie Britt, it\u2019s director of leadership development, co-teach a required course with the community\u2019s sophomore class that\u2019s focused on the design thinking process \u2013 ideation, creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n \u201cThe plan for this semester was to come up with a project based in our area, in the Mansfield area, that the students could work on creatively to solve a problem,\u201d says Rocha. \u201cWe didn’t know what the problem was, but it was a general idea.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/logo-300x157.jpg\"){kind=logo}
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