East-West Gateway Survey & Where We Stand Update

Our Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, is seeking feedback on how we engage in the community:

How Do You Engage in Improving Our Region?

East-West Gateway’s Public Involvement Plan helps EWG to ensure quality engagement and interaction with all of the citizens in the St. Louis metropolitan area. We need to know how we can design our outreach efforts in a way that makes your involvement easier, fuller and more likely. This survey will begin to form our public involvement plan. Please take a few minutes to respond. We appreciate your participation…Take Survey

Please take a few minutes to take the survey, then come back and share your thoughts on the questions being asked. They also just released the 7th update to most recent Where We Stand report (2011).

This update introduces new data on three measures of social mobility and discusses some of the community characteristics that are correlated with upward mobility.

The term “social mobility” refers to the idea that individuals can achieve a high standard of living, regardless of the circumstances into which they were born. The notion that even a poor child can work hard and get rich (or at least reach the middle class) has long had a hold on the American imagination, although numerous studies have documented that the United States has a far lower level of social mobility than most of the other wealthy nations around the world.

I’ve not had a chance to do more than scan the update, but I wanted to pass along the link.

— Steve Patterson