The Envision Opelika Foundation Inc. has been supporting the goals generated by the citizens of Opelika to help improve the quality of life for the community since 2002.
According to the foundation’s mission statement, it “seeks broad participation, develops new leadership within the community, and facilitates the identification and implementation of concrete strategies to accomplish established goals.”
The two ideas that represent the foundation are that people can affect change if they specifically say what they want and that the future can not be predicted, but people can say what they want for the future.
If these two ideas are accomplished, people are able to work together toward a shared desired goal.
Barbara Patton, executive director of Envision Opelika Foundation Inc., said the foundation addresses the goals “either by making sure there is somebody already doing it or trying to prod a group that it belongs to.”
For example, the environmental and beautification goals are dealt with by the group Keep Opelika Beautiful.
With many goals accomplished in the past six years, the foundation just broke ground on a new one, a need for state of the art recreational parks and facilities. They did the concept plan, received a grant from the Charter Foundation, got an architect on the case and put it all together through a task force.
“As an architecture student, I appreciate what this foundation is doing for our community,” said Michael Casey, a junior in architecture. “Not only are they designing new buildings, but they are also trying to fill all the empty buildings in Opelika.”
The group started to help the citizens fulfill their top priorities. “The top priorities were to have a new state of the art recreational facility and to reuse a lot of empty buildings,” Patton said.
The task force put together books, containing tax history and space, on each building so that if someone was looking to open a business, that person would have all the information on the building.
Along with the improvement of city buildings, the foundation also strives to deal with race relations. The group puts on skits in different programs to bring different people together and also recently had the Two By Two Unity Run.
The Two by Two Unity Run was created out of the Race Relations Cultural Diversity Task Force to promote teamwork and build relationships between people in the community.
The task force did research on similar events, one that occurred in Selma and modeled the run after theirs, but used some of their ideas.
“We encouraged the runners to pair up from different races or cultures and to be linked together at the wrist with a Velcro link (as they ran),” said Tom Tippett, the chairman for the Envision Opelika Race Relations Cultural Diversity Task Force.
Although the idea came from a similar event that occurs in Selma, Envision Opelika came up with the ideas to use Velcro to link the runners together and created something of its own.
Tippett also works on another project that has come out of the Race Relation Cultural Diversity Task Force called Character Council. It was presented in 2007 to the City School Board, Chamber of Commerce and the Envision Opelika Board.
All these groups supported it, and then it was passed at Opelika City Council.
“The purpose of the Character Council is to promote excellence and character among our citizens in all sectors of our community: education, business, city government and media relations,” Tippett said.
Along with the Character Council is something else that may be familiar, the Character Word of the Month. The word of the month was started at the Opelika high school and then became a part of the middle school.
“Our part of it is to take it out into the community and make an emphasis on the whole community,” Patton said.
The word is put into newsletters, articles and also on marquees at businesses around town.
This month, the word is Integrity, and the Character Council is helping spread the action throughout the community.
“We want everyone to be aware that character development and character education is important,” Patton said.
