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h. Minnesota Milestones -The State of Minnesota The Minnesota Milestones project was started in 1991 by Governor Arne Carlson and was inspired by the Oregon Benchmarks document (see below). Minnesota Planning, a state agency, led the project and began by conducting an intensive outreach campaign to raise public awareness and involvement in the process. Thousands of invitations were sent, and the media were used intensively to bring Minnesotans to the 30 community meetings held in 15 locations around the state. More than 1600 citizens ended up coming to the meetings to discuss their dreams and ideas for the future of Minnesota. The Minnesota Planning staff reviewed the 40,000 ideas that were collected at the meetings and came up with a vision statement for the Minnesota they wanted to live in 20 to 30 years from now. The Choosing Our Future document was drafted and distributed to thousands of citizens for review and comment. Based on that citizen input, the document was revised. During this time, the Minnesota Planning staff developed 27 broad goals and 103 indicators to use in measuring future progress. These goals and indicators were published as the Minnesota Milestones: Public Review Draft. Surveys were included in the draft, and more than 8,000 copies were sent out to the public for comment. Almost 500 people attended one of the 15 meetings across the state to comment on the draft. Presentations were made to various civic and community groups for their responses, and experts were brought in to review the indicators. In 1992 final revisions were made, and Minnesota Milestones: A Report Card for the Future was published in December. State agencies began using the document as a guideline for their budgeting requests, and they developed other strategies to begin achieving the Minnesota Milestone goals. Although this was primarily a "top-down" process organized by Minnesota Planning, the project involved many citizens and gave citizens ample opportunity for input. By integrating community visioning meetings, surveys, and extensive comment periods, the Minnesota Milestones was a successful statewide project.