Billings Community Conversations
As an outcome of the January 30 Can We Talk? workshop in Billings, featuring Patricia Hughes, author of Gracious Space. The City of Billings has taken some rather extraordinary steps. First, Pat Hughes came back to Billings for a Gracious Space workshop for the City Council, staff and administration. Then, a series of eight Community Conversations were scheduled to discuss issues identified as important in a recent city-wide survey. Gracious Space is the background and the conversation cafes are the process. We're in the midst of these conversations right now, having completed five, with three to go. Nice to see the public discourse work of Humanities Montana and Billings partners - Leadership Montana, MSU Billings, Parmly Billings Library- is alive and well and ongoing through these Community Conversations.
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Comment by Bruce Whittenberg on November 24, 2009 at 9:51am -
Lisa, I apologize for not responding to your post earlier. Shame on me for not seeing it.
This has been quite a process, and the City Council agonized over the questions, format, everything. It was perceived as much more of a risk than it was. All is well however, and the process continues now with Council and staff incorporating the conversations into their strategic planning. I'd be glad to discuss this if you'd like to give a call at 896-5877.
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Comment by Lisa Simon on September 17, 2009 at 9:32am -
Thanks for sharing Bruce. I would be interested to hear how the conversations were structured. I can see from your post that they centered around certain issues-- what were those issues (did they emerge as theme words like "Cooperation")? and how did the facilitators go about addressing them? Do you use team-building exercises? Passages of literature?
This program seems to share goals with the Civic Discussions program (which is terrific) and I'm just wondering if they differ in the details.
thanks,
lisa
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