Molly De Marco's blog
I don't have a summary of today's sessions because I had a work conference call, so perhaps another attendee can provide one (I'm talking to you Lee Storrow). However, at the end of the sessions today we talked about what we were going to take away from the Visit. Here is a listing:
The 2nd day of our Inter-City visit was really fascinating, with interesting presentations and lots of good dialogue and ideas. We started with a panel discussion on economic development. Some tidbits from that discussion:
If you've followed the wealth of tweets that have come out of this first day of the Inter-City Visit you know that three groups of participants got up early this morning and made our way to Indiana by bus, plane, and bus again. We took a bus tour of Bloomington, had an opening reception, and then split into groups to have discussions about housing, downtowns, sustainability, education, and the arts. Over 60 members of the Bloomington community joined us for these conversations.
Here are my impresssions so far.
- Many of the buildings downtown and on Indiana University's campus are made of locally quarried limestone and are really lovely.
- Bloomington has a very large downtown that is laid out in a much more grid-like configuration than Carrboro or Chapel Hill.
- Bloomington is home to IU and is the county seat and has a lot of associated reasons to bring folks downtown.
- Bloomington City Hall is located in a renovated factory (the Showers Factory) that is very attractive.
Nearly 80 participants leave for Bloomington a week from this Sunday. The discussions to be held during the visit should spark some interesting dialogue both during the event and once back in Orange County. The visit is split up into a series of Conversations with topics including: Community Branding, Economic Development, A Thriving Downtown, Student Housing, University-Community Partnerships,Innovations in Government, Community Colleges: Entrepreneurship and Workforce Development, and K-12 Education. There will also be time for one-on-one conversations with our counterparts. On the second day there will be field trips to a trail, theater, high school, museum, or art center (I hope to go visit the Bloomington Community Orchard).
The Twitter hashtag for the visit is #ICV2012. I plan to tweet during the visit (@mollsdemarco), and I imagine a number of others will as well.
The Organizing Against Racism (OAR) Alliance is a local, grassroots group educating about and organizing against institutional and systemic racism.We are sponsoring four distinct forums with different policy foci: Education, Health, Economic Justice, and Civil Rights and Disenfranchisement. Each forum will feature a speaker or a panel to discuss policy and election issues as they pertain to race. We are taking this focus to address the fact that people of color have the worst outcomes on all US indicators of well-being including economic, education, health, and justice. These outcomes reflect the dominance of white culture, interests, and policy.
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