For more than 25 years, dozens of local planning departments have held regular community planning academies (CPAs) for residents as a way to provide land-use education; demystify the complex and arcane world of planning, zoning, and land development; and improve community engagement in their planning processes. In the summer of 2021, a team from the Research to Action Lab at the Urban Institute began a national scan of different academy models to identify and synthesize their core characteristics and common features and to explore the following questions: Who hosts the academy? Who participates? And what do the academies teach? Beyond this descriptive research, the team began to develop a promising pathway for revamping existing academies and redesigning new ones: a CPA prototype that could serve as the catalyst for reforming current local land-use, land development, and urban planning systems so they are more inclusive, equitable, and resilient.

This policy brief offers a blueprint for reimagining planning academies so communities can ensure their land-use systems address the contemporary and concurrent land-use challenges of climate change, housing instability, racial injustice, and pandemic recovery. After a brief overview of the project and its rationale, we outline three basic planning academy types—the traditional CPA, the planning professionals academy (PPA), and the community builder academy (CBA). Each model customizes its format and offerings for different participant groups, each with slightly different goals, programming, and levels of understanding about local planning and land-use systems. We then synthesize the four essential features of those models into a framework for a new prototype CPA—the primary focus of this project—that elevates community voice, empowers residents, and lays the foundation for revamping existing planning and land-use systems. We describe our preliminary efforts to launch the prototype in Fresno and conclude with a call to action that includes several policy and program recommendations for improving and reinvesting in CPAs:

• Expand the scope and scale of CPA programming;
• Align multiple academy models through collaborative partnerships and networks;
• Support learning opportunities that lead to action, advocacy, and community capacity building;
• Elevate structural racism and equitable land use reforms
• Leverage federal and state grants to support community land-use education and capacity building;
• Establish a national learning network of planning academies