"Never
doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed
citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
- Margaret Mead
--
Last Wednesday, a small group of about 70 thoughtful,
committed citizens gathered at the John XXIII Pastoral Center for a What’s
Next, WV workshop where we learned how to convene and facilitate similar
workshops but my thoughts were with the people who weren’t there.
In many ways, the participant list looks like a Who’s
Who of the usual civic engagement suspects, people who get paid to attend
meetings, seminars and workshops. But what about the people WV Center for Civic
Life Board President, Paul Gilmer, called the “disenfranchised?” Gilmer
described these as the people who feel so powerless and so excluded that when
they hear of an event or a program that may empower and activate them they say
“That’s for them, not for me.”
Perhaps we’ve been mislabeling some of these
disenfranchised as “complacent” or “apathetic.”
You’d never know it by looking at the participant
list but What’s Next, WV is not just for the people WV Center for Civic Life Director,
Betty Knighton, lauded, extolled and introduced to the crowd. All but a few of
the What’s Next, WV attendees are professional civic engagers. I met people who
may as well have been wearing a sign that said “I’m here for the free lunch and
because my boss sent me.” But a visioning project where citizens of all ages,
ideologies, social strata and races can come together and dream out loud about
a better West Virginia and how to realize that dream is not just for people who
are lucky enough to be among the self-actualized few who are paid to attend
meetings but also for the self-conscious, disenfranchised people who don’t have
business cards, “the right clothes” and who can’t afford to take a day off from
work to hobnob with “them.”
I want to encourage my fellow conveners and
facilitators to hold some What’s Next meetings at night and on weekends when
more and different people can attend.
And while I absolutely love West Virginia Public
Radio, let’s use every form of media we can to reach a broader, bigger
audience. Yes, I know that people who listen to public broadcasting tend to be well
informed but good ideas can even come from people who didn’t hear about What’s
Next via WV Public Broadcasting. As we go forth to convene and facilitate let
us not pretend we don’t know how to send media releases to all media outlets.
And let’s not pretend that we’re still living in a time when you have to own an
FCC broadcast license or a printing press to get your message out. Let’s use
Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and anything else we can think of to get as
many people as possible in a room together to dream big and organize for action
to make West Virginia better.
--
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