Progress Report

Since the last meeting of the advisory committee in October, we have continued to make progress in a number of areas.

Cindy Balderson of ConnectRappahannock and I hosted the first Lancaster/Northumberland Resource Sharing Forum meeting on October 15th at 9:00 a.m. in the Lancaster Community Library meeting room. We had a good turnout of about 20 people representing a wide variety of organizations and agencies. We gave each participant a chance to tell the rest what their mission or function was and to share any materials they had brought. I discussed the goals of VISIONS briefly, and Cindy discussed how Connect can help all these organizations, agencies, and nonprofits stay in touch and be aware of what others are doing. We passed around sign-up sheets for the Connect affinity email groups. We assigned the "homework" of inviting at least one representative of a group that had not participated in this first meeting, but should. Our next meeting is Thursday, November 19th, same time and place.

Cindy has since added the participants to their desired groups and to the general Connect list. I have followed up with a thank you email to participants with a reminder of their homework. Cindy and I hope to attend a meeting of the Gloucester Resource Council, our model for this group, next week.

Communications (Marilyn Warren, Paula Fisher, Susan McFadden) has met several times. Since one of the recommendations that came out of their initial meeting was to develop a website, I have been meeting with them as well with the idea that I might be called on to develop and maintain that website. We have focused on communication around what we had been calling "study circles" but will in future refer to as community conversations. The communications group feels that VISIONS will become better known as the entity sponsoring this conversation process. We have a preliminary logo and Susan is checking into website costs. We are developing a "fact sheet" to introduce the community conversation process and aid in recruiting.

Recruitment (Merthia Haynie, Ken Rioland) has done a great job of inviting people to participate in a pilot Community Conversation. Their next task will be to recruit facilitators for training in January.

The pilot conversation started Monday at 7:00 p.m. Marilyn Warren and Ken Rioland facilitated and will continue to do so for 4 more meetings, three of them scheduled for Monday nights at the same time. The additional meeting they will schedule as a group. They had 8 participants and expect to add 2 or 3 more next week. They are meeting at Net Cruisers Cafe in Lancaster. The owner, Holly Ransone Pleasants, has very kindly agreed to host this pilot group and is opening the cafe on Monday nights just for them.

The advisory committee will meet again this Monday, November 2nd, at 8:30 a.m. at the Lancaster library.