Clear Vision Eau Claire’s Empowerment Summit held its first session for community
planning on October 4. Participants gathered a huge roster of local ideas. The next Empowerment Summit meeting is October 25

The idea of true democracy certainly sounds great: Average citizens voicing their opinions civilly and putting their minds together to do great things. Who wouldn’t want that? But while that idea is great, sometimes the execution is off a bit. Civic work can be really hard work and takes certain skills to remain focused.

The purpose of Clear Vision Eau Claire’s Empowerment Summit is to bridge the gap between those two. The program is composed of four training sessions where attendees can learn how to take an idea and run with it, with the help of the rest of their community.

The sessions keep in theme with Clear Vision Eau Claire’s purpose: To involve the community in civic action. Clear Vision has been using these processes in their own meetings to move forward on initiatives and now want to spread the knowledge to the rest of the community.The sessions keep in theme with Clear Vision Eau Claire’s purpose: To involve the community in civic action. Clear Vision – which is partly behind the Confluence Project and has worked on other public projects – has been using these processes in their own meetings to move forward on initiatives and now want to spread the knowledge to the rest of the community.

The first training session was held Oct. 4 (don’t worry, you can still catch the next three) at Hope Luthern Church and brought out close to a hundred residents, ranging in age from high school-ers to senior citizens. The groups gathered at tables of six to eight and engaged in various ‘structured conversations’ throughout the evening to discuss, among other things, what Eau Claire values as a community (at my table, some of the responses included valuing the environment, community diversity and education), what challenges Eau Claire faces (a north side vs. south side division or losing our history to development) and what ideas people had to address those issues (I heard everything from a community-based kitchen to a small grant program to interfaith activities).

The four sessions are based on training developed at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, though applying it to a city as a whole is new territory – it’s usually reserved for specific neighborhoods or organizations. The essential process is to first identify the values of the community you’re serving, then come up with ideas to promote those values and work together to reach ‘public achievement’ – which is a fancy term for just getting stuff done.

In the next three meetings, groups will start to do more than just train. Participants will begin actively working on their own ideas, giving them a jumpstart to go out into the full community with them.

So while a number of community discussions and community forums have come – and sometimes gone – the hope of the Empowerment Summit is that the skills learned will stick with participants and can be applied across a variety of different goals and hopes.

Now doesn’t that sound like perfect democracy?

The next Empowerment Summit meeting is Oct. 25 from 6:30-9pm at Peace Luthern Church, 501 E. Fillmore. For more information, go to
ClearVisionEauClaire.org.