ILI - Lakeland Area Community Meeting

There were about 25 people for this meeting. We met in the library at the high school for a quieter meeting space. We started out in a circle with introductions. Bob welcomed everyone and expressed appreciation for everyone coming together for the evening. Fred Maulson (GLIFWC) and Mike McKenzie (DNR) started off the meeting by sharing the story of how they have worked to bring their agencies to come together to work cooperatively. Bob had asked them to come and share their story for everyone to see a positive example of people coming together-from different cultures- to improve the overall community by bringing different viewpoints together for a common cause: in this case to protect our natural resources. They told the stories of what their agencies do, how their jurisdictions overlap, how they collaborate and communicate. It was obvious that there was great deal of respect in this working partnership-a great model for all of us to follow. They stated that communication is very important, sometimes a challenge, but always worth it to work things out. This was an excellent way to get us in the right frame of mind to move into our general meeting.

When we started these community meetings a year ago the idea was to build consensus throughout our communities-by encouraging dialogue and participation-with the goal in mind of developing a Community Wide Prevention Plan. Prevention covers a wide range of topics and we have certainly touched on all of them over the past year from racism to substance abuse. A Prevention Plan will help us identify the elements of our communities and schools that provide what is needed for healthy children and families: equality, safety, how to make positive life choices, a safety net for those in need, accountability of those in charge, positive role models, prevention programs, laws and policies etc. In many ways our discussions over the past year have laid out a framework of what it takes to be good citizens in our communities. Interestingly enough, in the last few weeks the high school has begun to look into revisiting their Citizenship Plan in their handbook. Bob talked to the group about the Citizenship Committee that has been started at the high school, which he was invited to participate on, and the similarities of our early discussions. The purpose of the committee was to help LUHS identify a mission and vision statement for their citizenship plan. The current plan in the handbook is more of a discipline code and it seems that LUHS was looking for some guidance from a community group to help put elements of citizenship into this plan. In preparing for one of the meetings, ILI staff was looking through the LUHS Handbook and saw a DPI website cited for building a Citizenship Plan-we checked it out and it was an amazing resource: a step-by-step guide for communities to follow. We have already been on this journey through our community meetings so we brought copies to both the LUHS committee and this meeting tonight. Both groups have agreed that it is a very worthwhile tool to utilize. While this tool kit is cited in the current LUHS handbook none of the elements of it-or the process it describes- are incorporated into the plan. We have been hosting these community meetings to focus on our whole community, not just LUHS, and this tool kit seemed like a really good tool to follow to give us structure for the Community Wide Plan we are still focusing on in these meetings.

Everyone at the meeting received the DPI Tool Kit and we began the process. We’ll attach this toolkit to this email for you to look at. (DPI Toolkit) The first section deals with identifying core values for the community, so that is where we started this evening. We discussed the last correspondence from us that was a draft position paper with a suggestion of looking at the issue of sports participation in the Lakeland area. The group has decided that we should go through this process first.

We broke in the four groups: Parent, Youth, AODA, and Racism. Each group took about a half hour to talk about the core values that are important for that focus group. At the end of the time, the four groups came back to the circle to share these values.

After sharing the values that each group came up with, we ran out of time. We will take up where we left off at the next meeting. Bob asked people to fill out the survey on pages 28-35 of the tool kit and to mail that to him. Please feel free to do this on your own as well and mail that in-one of the key components of building this Plan is that there is strong representation of all communities. We really need your help. Now is the time to participate to bring positive changes to our community-but we need you to sacrifice some of your very valuable time to help us put this together. People in leadership positions across our area: judges, tribal council, county boards, businesses, schools-are very supportive of this process. Those that have the authority to create this change are waiting to hear what we come up with-so we need your participation. The next meeting will be held in Lac du Flambeau at the new Wellness Center in Lac du Flambeau on Wednesday October 24, 2007. Food at 5:30-6:00. Meeting from 6:00-8:00pm. We hope to see many of you there!

Lakeland Area Community Meetings