With over 20 years of experience in city planning, Zwahlen creates a combination of expertise and innovation.
When Tanya Mooza Zwahlen received her Bachelor’s Degree in English and Art History, city planning was not on her radar.
It wasn’t until Tanya read Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of American Cities that she discovered her passion for city and town planning. Shortly after, Zwahlan studied city and regional planning at Cornell University. Tanya received her Masters Degree in City and Regional Planning.
In 2007, Tanya founded Highland Planning, an urban planning development consulting practice in Rochester, focusing on effective public engagement and urban redevelopment projects. The team at Highland Planning has worked with communities nationwide and has received four exemplary practice awards from the American Planning Association.
Tanya loves designing public meetings. She went door-to-door at the beginning of her career to convince other community members to attend them (and still does!). Go-to-them strategies, getting to know the stakeholders, that’s Tanya’s way. That’s why she’s redesigning and modernizing the public engagement process by bringing it online.
Tanya Mooza Zwahlen is also the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Instant Input, who brings decades of public engagement experience and city planning expertise to the platform.
Zwhalen created Instant Input because she noticed a disconnect in communication within her community. Several years ago, she saw her children’s favorite playground suddenly disappear from the neighborhood. After working as a city planning consultant for over 20 years, Zwahlen knew that hosting a public meeting or printing informational flyers would have been costly ways to inform the neighborhood of the change. Unfortunately, this lack of communication often results in a disconnect between project developers and community members. After two decades of public engagement experience and a pandemic, Tanya’s team recognized the need for a new, simple solution to build relationships and get quick feedback on projects by meeting people where they are – online.
Instant Input’s online public engagement platform allows project owners to add and update their pins with new updates, information, and photographs, all while collecting surveys and comments from the community.
Public engagement should be accessible and transparent. Instant Input has revolutionized the public input process for both project owners and stakeholders. Click here to learn about Instant Input, our project map, and how to schedule a demo today to streamline your next project.
