The Creation of Cumberland Region Tomorrow

A Report to the Region, pg 6 – View the “Report to the Region”, PDF

Cumberland Region Tomorrow (CRT) was founded in 2000 as an outgrowth on a regional planning summit sponsored by Vanderbilt University and the Greater Nashville Regional Council the previous year. The 1999 summit was organized around issues raised by the Pierce Report, a series of articles in The Tennessean, that explored current and future growth issues for the region. The study was sponsored by the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies and The Tennessean. Much discussion at and after the 1999 summit centered on the need for a regional, citizen-based organization to bring attention to growth-related issues. CRT is that organization.

Cumberland Region Tomorrow is a private sector regional organization working with the public sector to support and encourage growth planning, with emphasis on land use, transportation, and preservation of the rural landscape and character of the region’s communities.

As a private, non-profit, citizen-based organization, we work with the Greater Nashville Regional Council and others in the public and private sector. CRT is dedicated to planning for the future livability and economic vitality of the ten-county region.

As a regional organization, CRT encounters many issues that face citizens daily. Because of the region’s agricultural heritage and vibrant economy, our main subjects of focus are the intertwined and wide-ranging issues of land use, transportation, and preservation of open spaces and the distinctive character of the region’s communities.

We are pursuing our mission through positive action. Our first steps were leading a Regional Visioning Process that involved hundreds of citizens participating in numerous public workshops across the region. The goals of the Visioning Process are to determine core regional values or guiding tenets as we prepare for continued growth, to analyze the consequences of current trends if we do not act on these values, and to start discussion of alternative growth scenarios and practices that can lead to different growth and development outcomes.

As the region-wide discussion of these issues continues, CRT’s focus will turn to the consideration and development of implementation tools which will help government officials, other decision makers and citizens bring new growth and development patterns to reality. The results of the community workshops and our future steps are the subjects of The Regional Visioning Project: A Report to the Region.