Plans for the New Year

During October and November, Ken Rioland, Marilyn Warren and Merthia Haynie facilitated a pilot Community Conversation. Participants included Lorraine Justice (Bay Aging CAP), Sandy Griffith (Grace Church Outreach), Torrence Harman (Priest, St. Mary's Whitechapel and Trinity Episcopal Church), Jean Poole (VISIONS advisory board), Wardell Carter (Boys and Girls Club), Jessica Jordan (Family Maternity Center of the Northern Neck), and Belinda Gaskins (Social Worker). They met on Monday nights for 5 weeks. Although the Community Conversation process would normally involve 6 weeks, the final week is an Action Forum meeting when all groups come together to share their ideas with each other. Since there was only one group, they could not do the final step.

The feedback from the group was that it went well, that participants were willing to invest the time needed, and they were able to identify some tangible goals. Specifically, this group wanted to develop programs to reduce teen pregnancy and find better ways to mentor children. They felt better mentoring would provide role models and promote higher goals. They also discussed the issues of financial barriers to getting drivers licenses and GED's and were concerned about high school graduation rates.

Towards the end of this process, Lindsy Gardner and Merthia Haynie got together with some people to begin the work of recruiting facilitators for the February-March round of Community Conversations. The training for those facilitators is planned for January 16th, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., at Trinity Episcopal Church in Lancaster. Gwen Whiting will be on hand for that training. We hope to recruit at least 15 facilitators; some of the participants in the pilot indicated a willingness to train to facilitate other groups.

The Communications group (Susan McFadden, Marilyn Warren, Paula Fisher and I) have continued to meet about every other week. Susan and her team at Open Door Communications have been enormously helpful. They developed a logo for us and will be producing all the materials for a mailing early in January. We are close to finishing a packet of materials that will go out to churches, social service departments, and other agencies at that time. The packet will include a cover letter, explanatory information, poverty fact sheet, mini-poster, and registration forms. In addition, to promote the activities of VISIONS, I have set up a Facebook presence which we hope will increase interest and reach a wider demographic.

Cindy Balderson (Connect Rappahannock) and I have continued with the Resource Sharing Forum for Lancaster and Northumberland Counties. We held one in October and one in November, but were unable to meet in December because of holiday conflicts. We will meet again on January 21st at 9 a.m. at the Lancaster Community Library. Although we feel we have made a good beginning, we are disappointed that there has been so little follow-up use of Connect.

The Kick-off Event for the Community Conversations on Reducing Poverty will take place on January 23rd at the Ruritan Center on Rte. 201 near Lively. All participants and facilitators will be invited to attend this two-hour event and we hope to take this opportunity to assign participants to groups and ascertain any specific needs that we will need to meet to help participants, including childcare and transportation. The groups will meet from late January to early March and will conclude with an Action Event to share their ideas and strategies. Those ideas and strategies can then hopefully be incorporated into an implementation grant.

Please visit the VISIONS Facebook and become a fan! I will continue to post news here and on Facebook, as well as on Connect Rappahannock.

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.

Advisory Board Meeting on October 5th

For those of you who couldn't make the meeting yesterday, here are my notes. I apologize for their length; we covered a fair amount of ground. Believe it or not, I left out some! (Sorry, Jack, I know it all comes down to education and jobs and it was an interesting conversation, but I'm just going to focus on the nuts and bolts.)

There was a handout which you can view at this link:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20714739/VISIONS-Advisory-Committee-Handout

In the sidebar of the handout, one of the agenda items was the executive committee's decision to rename the steering committee. The name Advisory Board or advisory committee seems to more accurately describe the role this group plays. We would like this group to be active in advising and promoting the dialog-to-action process that VISIONS has decided to sponsor in seeking community involvement and conversation on potential strategies to reduce poverty in the Northern Neck. Please take a look at the handout.

We have identified 4 core committees to work toward this process.

Marilyn Warren, Paula Fisher and Susan McFadden have begun the work of Communications. Marilyn and Paula reported on their meeting with Susan last Wednesday. They are grappling with some of the communication problems and issues. They recommend moving away from "building assets" to improving lives and building community. They feel that the term "study circles" does not really describe in a positive way what we are sponsoring and felt the term "community conversations" did. They recommend that we develop a fact sheet for media, a short bulletin piece for church newsletters, and a poverty awareness fact sheet. Susan feels strongly that VISIONS needs to develop its own website, with links to the blog, a Facebook link, media links, and so on. The domain name northernneckvisions.org is available and the cost to register that for three years is $159.95. We may need to seek sponsors for the website. In the meantime, the focus of communication will be on the community conversations VISIONS is sponsoring or facilitating. They will meet again tomorrow.

The Recruitment committee, spearheaded by Merthia Haynie and Ken Rioland, will continue to work toward gathering a group for one pilot community conversation to take place in October and November. It would be on Monday nights, probably 7:00-9:00, beginning October 19th and going for 5 weeks. Marilyn Warren has agreed to facilitate, Ken is willing to co-facilitate when he is available, but we still need one more facilitator and 10-12 participants. The pilot group will help us better understand the process and anticipate planning needs for the larger round early next year.

Planning currently consists of me and Dave Alberts, with some assistance from Paul Sciacchitano. We hope to meet this week. The number one issue for us at this point is finding a venue for the pilot conversation. The library is not available, nor is the Bank of Lancaster Community Room.
Any suggestions would be welcome. It needs to be free and at least somewhat centrally located.

The handout includes a tentative timeline; please look it over.

The final area is resource sharing. Cindy Balderson and I have already scheduled and publicized the first Resource Sharing Forum. At the June conference and at the August orientations, the issue of identifying services already in place and promoting greater collaboration and cooperation came up repeatedly. We plan to hold monthly meetings, starting Thursday, October 15th at 9:00 a.m. with a 2 hour maximum time limit. We have deliberately issued a very broad invitation to any nonprofits, government agencies, and churches who wish to share information with one another to attend. Cindy will be encouraging them to sign up for ConnectRappahannock so their profiles can be shared electronically. Jack Russell and others pointed out that phone calls are our best bet for a good turnout, so Cindy and I will meet and divide up a list of people to call. Jean Poole has agreed to help with the resource sharing effort.

Paul Sciacchitano shared some news from the River Counties Community Foundation. They were able to raise $84,000 through various matching opportunities and have met with the three counties DSS to identify where those funds might best be spent. Each DSS will receive $25,000 as a discretionary fund to distribute as they see fit to people who "fall through the cracks" in terms of the moneys the DSS normally has to give. The rest is going to the Red Cross and to area Food Banks.

Finally, we would like to set up regular monthly meetings of the Advisory Committee. Lindsy will be sending you a Doodle Poll, a free online scheduling tool, through your email, giving some choices for days and times that are possibilities. Please, please respond! It is simple to do and we want to identify the best time for all our members.

Upcoming meetings

There is a meeting of the whole steering committee coming up this Monday, October 5th, at 8:30 a.m. at the Lancaster Community Library. We hope the steering committee members will be there to hear what VISIONS has been doing and what we hope to do in the months ahead.

Also, join VISIONS and ConnectRappahannock for the first meeting of its kind in our area. Together we are hosting a Resource Sharing Forum on Thursday, October 15th at 9:00 a.m. at the Lancaster Community Library in Kilmarnock. If you are a nonprofit, government agency or church that provides services to people in need in Lancaster and Northumberland County, please join us for this opportunity to share information about who you are and what you are doing in our community.

By connecting with each other, we can be more effective in addressing issues in our area. Bring a business card or any written materials you would like to share with the other organizations, churches and agencies.

As space is limited, we ask that only one representative from each group attend. Please reply to Alison Towles at visions@lancasterlibrary.org or Cindy Balderson at rappahannockinfo@connectnetwork.org

Partners Foundation for affordable housing

This was a wonderful article 2 weeks ago in the Rappahannock Record on the duPont grant to the Partners for Lancaster County Schools Foundation and the Morattico Baptist Church for their affordable rental housing project for teachers, nurses, other RGH employees, law enforcement, and municipal and county employees. Unfortunately, the Rappahannock Record does not archive their articles and the link that was posted here is no longer valid. I hope everyone read it while they had the chance.

Study Circle Orientation, August 18 & 19

Approximately 30-35 people came out for a two-night event at the Northumberland County Community Center facilitated by Gwen Whiting. VISIONS plans to sponsor study circles as a way to invite Northern Neck citizens to discuss poverty and to identify actionable strategies to reduce it in our area. Gwen lead the group through activities and discussions to help us better understand the power of the study circles process and the organization required to make them happen successfully in the Northern Neck.

After a review of the agenda, an introduction, and a fun ice breaker activity, Gwen gave us an overview of the dialogue to action process. We then watched a video and heard more about how other communities have used this process to tackle a number of issues. It was interesting to hear that the process was so successful that many of the communities continue to use it to tackle other problems.

We then broke out into smaller groups to get a feel for what a study circle was like. We were given questions that might be asked in an initial study circle gathering. It was surprising and inspiring to find that people in a small group setting can share so much about themselves so honestly.

Lindsy Gardner reviewed the history and progress of VISIONS over the last couple of years and explained the DuPont Fund initiative to reduce poverty in their target communities.

In our large circle, we each had an opportunity to share our hopes for how our community might be improved and what we saw to be the barriers to that improvement. I have had an opportunity to transcribe those hopes and potential barriers and, while they are as diverse as one might expect, there is also a surprising amount of consensus. More than half of the group saw communication and attitudes as being problematic and the hopeful target for substantial change.

On Wednesday, Gwen met with some people who had not been able to attend on Tuesday over dinner before beginning with the large group again. We considered some of the potential racial issues that will inevitably come up in a discussion of poverty. We broke out into smaller groups and shared our personal experiences, our first awareness of racial differences and what impact, if any, it had on us. Again, it was illuminating to hear how honest and straightforward that conversation could be in a small group.

During a break, we were encouraged to sign up for some committees that will do the work of organizing the study circle process. Gwen reviewed some of the organizational needs in planning the study circle process. One of the key areas is communication. Three groups were then formed to discuss ways to communicate with and attract the participation of three separate groups, the been here’s, the come here’s, and the come back here’s. Those ideas were then shared with the whole group at large.

Finally, we had an opportunity to meet as smaller groups around four areas, planning, recruiting facilitators, recruiting participants, and communication. When we all got together as a large group afterwords, it was clear that we had only scratched the surface of what each of those committees needed to accomplish. As a result, it was determined that the planned timeline for implementing the study circles needed to be adjusted to allow for more time to properly organize the study circles for success.

Partners Foundation for affordable housing

Just to add to the previous post with the link to a Virginia Business article on the lack of affordable housing in this area, VISIONS just got some good news from Bill Warren, the president of the Partners for Lancaster Schools Foundation.

That organization and Rev. Craig Smith of Morattico Baptist Church have been working together on an affordable housing project here in the Northern Neck. Their commitment is, in their words: “We will build and operate affordable rental housing for our teachers, RGH nurses and employees, law enforcement, and municipal/county employees.”

Bill recently shared the exciting news that, through Morattico Baptist Church, the Partners Foundation initiative will receive $102,440 over a two-year period from the Jesse Ball DuPont Fund. This is one of the largest and most important grants to date because it gives them enhanced credibility and visibility in the charitable community, according to Bill. He gives Rev. Smith credit for making this possible.

The Partners Foundation has also benefited from a $100,000 grant from the Nettie Lokey Wiley & Charles L. Wiley Foundation and a $20,000 grant from the Lancaster County Industrial Development Authority. Within the last two weeks, they received a $20,000 grant from the Broaddus Foundation and $15,000 from local donors.

The Partners Foundation has raised $350,000 of the $600,000 needed to ensure that the project is “self-sustaining” based on the rents paid by residents. They seem to be well on their way to achieving their commitment to provide affordable housing. This is great news for those of us involved in VISIONS and in the Northern Neck Housing Study. Thank you, Bill, for sharing this information!