Tuesday, September 27, 2005
The Many Approaches to Community Outreach
More info from the International City/County Management Conference in Minneapolis.......I attended two interesting sessions today. One dealt with what communities with a large Latino population are doing to reach out to those residents in their cities. One part of that session was a Powerpoint presentation with a summary of a "Municipal Best Practices for the Hispanic Community" survey conducted by the University of North Texas. The survey really shows, I think, how little some communities do to reach out to their Latino population, yet they believe it is a whole lot. I struggle with what we do in Santa Paula, but clearly we are way ahead of the curve nationally. Some communities still approach all this from the "outside looking in" where in Santa Paula we reach out to our Latino community like we try to reach out to all of our residents.
The second session of interest was called "From the Pub to the Coffeehouse: Tapping Into Informal Networks" where people actually talked about doing community outreach activities in coffeehouses (where more and more people in a community gather) and, yes, in pubs. Now the presentation on outreach in pubs was from the Kettering Borough Council in the UK. They use rooms in pubs for community meetings, voting and public debates. Mayor Krause is already on to this with her monthly meetings at the Whistlestop. I can see us soon at the bar at the Mupu Grill now having a meeting on Fagan Canyon or East Area One. Or perhaps at least discussions at Limoneira Coffee Company or Santa Paula Coffee Company. I would love to develop some more ways to have a greater dialogue in these places.
The conference ends tomorrow with a talk from perhaps the most famous Minnesotan since Hubert Humphrey (or Jesse Ventura): humorist Garrison Keillor.
The second session of interest was called "From the Pub to the Coffeehouse: Tapping Into Informal Networks" where people actually talked about doing community outreach activities in coffeehouses (where more and more people in a community gather) and, yes, in pubs. Now the presentation on outreach in pubs was from the Kettering Borough Council in the UK. They use rooms in pubs for community meetings, voting and public debates. Mayor Krause is already on to this with her monthly meetings at the Whistlestop. I can see us soon at the bar at the Mupu Grill now having a meeting on Fagan Canyon or East Area One. Or perhaps at least discussions at Limoneira Coffee Company or Santa Paula Coffee Company. I would love to develop some more ways to have a greater dialogue in these places.
The conference ends tomorrow with a talk from perhaps the most famous Minnesotan since Hubert Humphrey (or Jesse Ventura): humorist Garrison Keillor.
