What comes next?

On Thursday, June 11th, a number of us got together to discuss the conference and consider the next steps.

Some of the positives that were expressed included the value of hearing that this process takes time and that people will phase in and out, the great outcome of small group discussions, the significant collection of information that took place at the conference, and the importance of identifying a core group of committed individuals. Some of our concerns going forward are the need to diversify and involve more people, keeping up the momentum of the process started by the conference, and identifying ways to apply the ideas and information that we gained.

As has been mentioned before, no one wants to lose sight of the housing study and all that it revealed. It was suggested that it might be more productive to think of the housing study in broader terms, as a source of data or as an economic development tool.

Rev. Edward King filled us in on some of the ongoing duPont Fund activity in the region. Lancaster Partners for Education, through the Morattico Baptist Church, have submitted a proposal for workforce housing that has been invited for final review. DuPont has also funded a planning grant to St. Mary's at Fleeton in Northumberland County for rental housing. Rev. King emphasized the need for VISIONS to take a regional approach, including Richmond and Westmoreland County, and to encourage collaboration between counties and investors.

We discussed the potential value of working with Bay Aging in their new capacity as a Community Action Program.

The importance of strengthening non-profit involvement was another point that was made. Tom Gosse shared that the Wiley Foundation is working very hard to bring a program targeting preschool/prekindergarten children called Smart Beginnings to the area. It will hopefully become a key piece of the education and early childhood strategy.

We will continue to try to keep people informed of the work of VISIONS as we go along. There are any number of ways to do that, either by press release, blog, or email. There was an article in the Rappahannock Record on the conference yesterday, 6/18/09, and a wonderful article on connectRappahannock last week. Cindy Balderson is on board to help us set up a special email list through connectRappahannock as a working communication tool for those interested in contributing to the conversation or keeping up through an email list.

Check out connectRappahannock at this link:
http://www.connectrappahannock.org/

Gwen Whiting, one of our consultants and facilitators, will be leading us through a process of generating greater involvement, a curriculum called Study Circles. It is designed to generate community-wide conversations around a particular topic. In our case, the topic is poverty. As we noted last week, the people at the conference were not necessarily the folks who would benefit directly from building assets and community. Our challenge is to spread the word about VISIONS and our goals to all sectors of the community to lay the foundation for a successful Study Circles program. We hope to be ready to begin them by September.

We'll let everyone know when the orientation for that will be taking place. In the meantime, some of the small groups in the conference have expressed a desire to continue their conversations. One of these, led by Leslie Franklin, would like to tackle the "everyone on the same page" communication piece. We will also continue to explore resource mapping to see what is already in place and how we can coordinate those services. Those people who were on our conference directory list should have received an email from Lindsy Gardner making many of these same points.

This summer, duPont has funded a Summer Employment Network grant, administered through the Lancaster Community Library and Rappahannock Community College. I'll hope to post some information on how that's going later.

Thank you to all our participants for your wonderful efforts! We applaud your willingness to tackle this difficult issue and look forward to the work ahead.