Community meeting

[Today’s run: 3.5 miles]

I got an email from the chamber of commerce about a community meeting last night.  The meeting is being held by a foundation that makes grants to non-profits in our area.  And the notification was about looking at the issues facing our county and city.

So I decided to go.  I don’t have any expectation of applying for any grant money from this place (I’ve looked at that before), but it sounded like a good idea.

The had a good turn out, maybe 150 people.

They had some introductory stuff, then went through some demographic information about where our area fits in economic and education attainment figures for the US and for Mississippi.

Then we numbered off and they had us break up into six small groups and brainstorm about the community issues.  We listed lots of stuff.  Then they did weighted voting for each person’s top four issues.

Then we had a small snack 🙂

And then they put us all back together where the top 15 of the issues from all of the groups were put up and we did weighted voting again.  And then they had the top from that round.

Education, poverty, crime/addiction, apathy, and leadership vision where the top five.  None of those are a big surprise, and they roll-up a lot of the individual comments that my group had.

Mississippi is a place where you can live poor.  That’s a good thing, because if you’re poor you need a place to live.  But it’s also a bad thing because maybe you won’t have the motivation to better yourself.

I’ll tell you the thing that gets me the most is the litter.

I think there is a lot of pride in Mississippi.  Not pride _in_ Mississippi, but personal pride that keeps people from bending over and picking stuff up.  People drop trash all around.  Not so much refrigerators in the ditch kind of stuff, just wrappers and bottles and that kind of junk.  It’s almost everywhere.