Beautiful Trenton

Mission Statement:

  "Beautiful Trenton is a movement engaging diverse and committed Trenton residents to envision the future of the city, articulate this vision, educate the voting public about the issues, and encourage candidates and decision-makers to commit to progressive solutions."

- http://beautifultrenton.wordpress.com/

Projects:

  Beautiful Trenton has worked on various community strengthening and community empowering activities. Their work has ranged from community Cafes that allowed residents to converse and share ideas on how to improve the city, to steering candidate forums, to creating candidate questionnaires and answers to help understand each candidates's platform and stance on important issues.

Website Creators

  At The College of New Jersey, Professor Pearson's Writing for Interactive Multimedia class utilized the concept of teamwork to create an interactive website that would engage the citizens of Trenton to become informed and active voters in their community.

  Before any work on the actual website could be achieved, the class needed to learn and pinpoint key issues in Trenton that the citizens were important to the citizens. Ultimately the class came to the conclusion that the three most important issues on citizen's mind were: crime rate, education and the employment sector.

  The next step was to define a target audience and become familiar with the types of voters that would be using the website. After conducting a random sampled poll around The College of New Jersey campus and conducting online research, the class concluded that their target audience was a wide range of people: from first-time voters, to homeless voters, voters with a family and several jobs, senior citizen voters and voters whose first language may not be English.

  At this point, the students then began to formulate ideas as to what the ideal "Trenton Elections" website would look like, what information it would include and how it would function.

  Students worked in both small groups and as a collective, planning sample content and design proposals that eventually pieced into the website seen today.