help needed

[Joelle Lyons Everett]

Kerry--

Years ago, I facilitated a series of events in the small town where I lived,
designed to encourage communication between members of different community
systems and set some goals/priorities for the community.   Open Space,
Appreciative Inquiry and Future Search had yet to be invented--we used a design based
loosely on Ronald Lippitt's community development work.   Today I would do it in
Open Space.   There were some very good outcomes related to better
communication/coordination between community systems--ten years later, someone wrote a
grant proposal which was signed by the leaders of 63 different agencies, which
I thought was remarkable.   A new community festival was started which brings
many tourists into the county for a weekend, and the work is done by local
service clubs as a fundraiser for their own community-service programs.

So, in answer to your question, I do know that it is possible to influence
the direction of a community by bringing people together to talk to each other.

More recently, Peggy Holman worked with the Washington State Arts Commission
to use Open Space to get community input into their strategic plan.   The
design was very much like what you suggest--they had a statewide Open Space to
define the questions, then held more than twenty Open Space evenings in cities
and small towns all over the state, and another statewide OS at the end to begin
looking at the data.   The director of WSAC attended every Open Space.
Events were facilitated by local OS practitioners, pro bono.   It was a huge job
to process all the data and develop it into a plan--much more work than the
staff had anticipated.   Very exciting project.

Joelle



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