Editor: Rita Venant is a student at Wake Forest University and reflects on her summer internship.
The Queen City is no longer a place I recognize. Growing up just 25 minutes from Uptown, the heart of the city, I have personally witnessed Charlotte’s rapid growth. I have seen the creation of the Light Rail, the construction of the BB&T ballpark, the expansion of University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and many more additions.
It was not until I went off to college at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem that I realized the positive development of Charlotte let alone truly appreciate her beauty. Because of my experiences in college–living in another city for the first time in my life that I was old enough to remember and spending a semester living and working in Washington, D.C. — I was eager to find a political and/or communications focused internship in Uptown for the summer. I am pleased to intern for at-large Councilwoman Dimple Ajmera this summer. Continue Reading
As we look to build community and solve problems together, we learn quickly that communication can be an asset or a challenge. Good communication can lead to dialog and understanding, while poor communication (or none at all) can be neutral or even damaging to relationships.
For communication nerds, the term “noise” is used to describe anything that interferes with proper reception of a message. Think about how you watch video. Noise can be an interruption in your Wifi, a weather event that disrupts the signal or even a talkative person who prevents you from hearing what’s said. Continue Reading
The City of Raleigh has embarked on a generational effort to create America’s next great public park. The opportunity to create a new public space of this size (308 acres) in the heart of Raleigh is unparalleled in the United States. The City of Raleigh is committed to making Dorothea Dix Park a park for everyone, a place of belonging for all individuals, families, and communities — of every economic level, background, ethnicity, race, religion, interest, and need. As Adrian Benepe from the Trust for Public Land has said, “Dorothea Dix Park is the most important and exciting park project in America today.”
Over the next year, the City is partnering with the Dorothea Dix Park Conservancy and world-renowned landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh to create a visionary Master Plan for the park. Creating an iconic, inclusive, and sustainable public space requires broad, inclusive, and highly participatory community engagement.
After several more media showdowns, Councilman Tyrone Williams officially resigned in a May 3rd letter, leaving a vacant seat in Fayetteville’s City Council.
“It is now clear to me that the facts of what happened don’t matter as much as perception,” said Williams in the letter.
In the letter Williams maintained his innocence, took shots at the media and various other community members. While all signs pointed to a dug in, trenched out, defiant stance toward resigning, to everyone’s surprise he threw in the towel, sparing the city council a long arduous process of removing him.
The council discussed the process for replacing him and sought applications to fill the seat. I differ from many people who argue for what matters most in the who and how of filling this seat.
Editor’s Note: This comes from the blog of the IBM Center for The Business of Government. Drawing from the book, New Power (by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms), the premise is that “Participation needs to be much more than a website that allows you to point out occasional potholes in the street; it needs to be a constant and compelling experience that keeps people working together on the things that matter.” In their view, “The goal of new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.”
What are the goals of civic engagement?
What different models exist?
What is a real-life example of a pioneer in engagement? The example of four initiatives in New York City show the pioneering spirit.
What could hold back or expand engagement initiatives?
Earlier this month, I attended a professional conference in Portland, Oregon. I encountered many homeless people, so it made me think about my privileged role of flying to their city, having a safe hotel room, conducting my business and leaving. What can, or should, I do?
At the conference, I posted a request for how I could donate to a Portland organization that helps the homeless. It seemed like a decent thing to do. It would be a small way of acknowledging my connection to Portland, a city I have enjoyed visiting many times.
But a colleague from Idaho, Dr. Katherine Himes, offered a story that challenged my sentiments. Am I doing something just so I feel good? Is the transaction, arms-length donation what is really needed? Continue Reading
“We are speaking up for what we want—and what we don’t want—in our neighborhood”, stated Verna Torain, president of Cottage Grove Neighborhood Association, whose house was crushed by the tornado.
HUD Secretary Dr. Ben Carson was in her neighborhood on June 1 to kick off National Healthy Homes Month. Matthew Ammons and Michelle Miller, director and deputy director of HUD’s Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes, joined Secretary Carson for the meeting with Ms. Torain, fellow neighborhood leader Almetta Tennie, hospital leaders, and Greensboro healthy housing advocates. Community leadership is rising to the challenge after an April natural disaster.
How do individual virtues relate to community action? Can we follow in the footsteps of Ben Franklin and work to improve ourselves and our communities?
I’m glad to re-post a nice reflection from Victoria Fann which first appeared here and I learned about it via the NCDD blog.
A bit of background: “Ben Franklin Circles are about bringing people together, face-to-face, to improve ourselves and the world around us,” per their mission statement. Victoria first attended a couple meetings of a Ben Franklin Circle (BFC) in Asheville starting in September, 2017. Her circle has 8-10 people and meets monthly, Saturday mornings, rotating among people’s homes.
The circles discuss 13 virtues — similar to Franklin’s own circle of friends — to learn and support each other to be more virtuous. The thirteen virtues include silence, sincerity, humility, frugality and justice.
Here is Victoria’s post:
My Ben Franklin Circle in Weaverville, NC has been meeting since November 2017. Since I have been facilitating groups of various kinds since 1989, stepping into the role of facilitator for this group was easy for me. We met for the first four months with me asking most of the questions, reading the quotes and gently steering the conversation if we strayed away from the topic.
This seemed to work well, but something was missing. I had a gnawing feeling that there was a better way to structure our little group. Based on some words from his autobiography, I knew that Ben Franklin would heartily agree. For example, he writes, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
Involvement was precisely what we needed!
The first small step in this direction took place at our February meeting. Instead of discussing the virtues in the order listed on the Ben Franklin Circle website, I decided to write each one of the remaining virtues on small slips of paper and fold them up. I brought those papers to the meeting and placed them in a hat. At the end or our discussion, I asked a member to draw out one of the slips of paper, saying that we would discuss whatever virtue was chosen.
This felt good—so good, in fact, that at the March meeting, I decided to take this idea a step further. Prior to the meeting, I wrote out that month’s virtue questions and quotes provided by the Ben Franklin Circle website onto small slips of paper, folded them and placed them into a bowl at our host’s house. I then invited members to draw one out and read it aloud to the group to prompt our discussion. I also encouraged members to add their own questions.
Franklin’s very own group, on which the BF Circles are based, encouraged a similar involvement from the members of the group as he writes here: “I should have mentioned before, that, in the autumn of the preceding year, I had form’d most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the JUNTO; we met on Friday evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss’d by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased. Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute, or desire of victory; and, to prevent warmth, all expressions of positiveness in opinions, or direct contradiction, were after some time made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuniary penalties.”
What we discovered during that meeting was that having the members chose the questions at random and read them to the group led to a much deeper level of conversation. I suspect this was because the playing field had been leveled and everyone felt more engaged and involved than when I was the one asking most of the questions. My leadership role softened as I yielded to this more community-based approach. Our trust of each other and our willingness to explore the outer edges of the virtue increased exponentially. Plus, there was almost a palpable feeling of relief among all of us once we shifted into this more egalitarian way of relating to each other. It was clear we’d been seeking it all along.
The lesson for me was a reminder of how important it is to tune into the specific needs of a situation without assumptions, agendas or formulas, but rather an open mind and a willingness to learn.
Though initially my “expertise” proved to be a hindrance, the group process itself became the catalyst that allowed the solution to emerge effortlessly.
Thank you, Ben Franklin.
Victoria Fann is a writer, transformational coach, group facilitator and workshop leader. She hosts her own Ben Franklin Circle in Weaverville, NC each month.
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My P.S.: There are about 40 Ben Franklin circles and their locations are shown here.
Building empathy is one of the most difficult tasks communities face. Simply put, we’re often not programmed for it. Humans have spent the vast majority of their millennia here on Earth in tightly-knit communities where social norms and even survival frequently depended on us making quick judgments about those around us, in order to sort individuals into our “in-group” or an “out-group”. This “tribalism”, however, is not simply based on racial, ethnic, religious, or linguistic divides. It also plays out in our (relatively) much more diverse and integrated modern-day communities. And few issues in urban American communities divide us more than the fault lines around law enforcement. To some, police and sheriff’s officials embody the best values of our communities: security, order, and community involvement. To others, they represent the remnants of our country’s centuries-long infatuation with racial oppression.
As our communities grow and become more diverse, local government agencies are combining new and tested techniques to engage their residents. In the traditional model of community engagement, agencies relied on public meetings to get feedback from residents. While this can still be an effective means of engagement for some populations, many residents are missed in the process. Similarly, as governments have embraced new technology to bridge the gap, there is still no substitute for face-to-face interactions.
So what is the next step? How do you reach as many residents as possible in a meaningful way?Continue Reading
