INTRODUCTION
shaping our future
The KEYS region consists of Kittery, Eliot, York, and South Berwick, the four towns just to the north and east of Portsmouth and Dover, NH, across the Piscataqua and Salmon Falls Rivers. These are Maine towns with strong connections to New Hamshire. We need an especially strong sense of identity, to live well with connections to two states.
From 2004 to 2006, the KEYS Coordinating Council invited area citizens to plan the future of their region through conversations about their visions and values, accomplishments, goals, next steps, resources, and how they would measure their progress. Their responses were compiled, reviewed, revised, and are now available at this website, in the drop-down Topics menu above. These plans are always in process and open to change, and the topics we worked with are just one way to focus in on aspects of the whole:
TOPICS
During this process, measures, or "indicators," of progress were selected for most of the topic areas. These can be seen on each topic page, taken as far as each work group was able to go. As resources permit, they will be developed further in the future.
Whether used by students to research local issues, or by new residents looking for resources, or by businesses thinking of relocating here, these pages represent the thoughts of hundreds of citizens who cared enough about the future of this region to participate in making plans. The conversations they had, and the energy they felt, created change.
What is recorded here are the footprints of where the process has taken us so far, 9 years after our 1997 Future Search Conference held in York, Maine.
