Public Power - January/February 2008 - (Page 13) 7 After the program is over with, people will get involved in health care and social service activities as volunteers and in other capacities. Everybody winds up, one way or another, with additional education. One thing I think is especially nice: We were, as I mentioned, two cities and we had our Friday night football problems—as does everybody in the whole country. When we had this program, we didn’t say “okay, we want to make sure we have 10 from Auburn, six from Opelika.” Again, it always seemed to be balanced. We began to notice how many people lived in Auburn and worked in Opelika or lived in Opelika and worked in Auburn. We were already mixed. Both cities had to be successful and had to pull together. The program led to a pool of people who worked together. Did you see noticeable benefits in your economic development efforts? Oh yes. We were very blessed in our area because we had very good school systems. We also noticed things we’d like to see done. When we identified areas needing attention, the school systems had a group of people behind them, helping them do things. You’d drive around the community and notice, for example, that a particular neighborhood needed “litter” attention, so a group of people would get involved in that. The program lets you look at the wonderful things you have already and lets you look at some of the things that you need to get behind and make happen—who better can do that than the citizens themselves? When you have a class, for example, on the judicial system, who teaches it? We have a county justice center. Our jail is there for the county and both cities. We also have our court system there. We reserve a courtroom for the day and we come there and have the judges serving in the different capacities come in and talk to them and we have found every year that everybody is so interested in learning about our youth and the difficulties they are facwww.APPAnet.org 9 ing—more than when we were young. We have a lot of parole officers and those who are working with our youth. The prison provides a prisoner’s meal for us at lunchtime – it’s really interesting. After we have lunch, we always have a tour of the prison. We return to the courtroom maybe for about an hour, then we leave and go to a detention center, which we refer to as our Youth Development Center. It is a facility for youth from a number of counties where youth are brought to when they have problems, are abandoned or have legal problems. Most of them have committed a crime of some sort. When we leave that day, people are very touched, very troubled and often want to get involved with those particular young people. You use these opportunities to tell people about it—to show them what’s there and how they can help. 10 ting involved as they grow up and become a part of the community and they know they are needed and wanted. We don’t have a youth leadership program. I wish we did. But a lot of cities have good ones. 8 Do you have an active alumni organization for people who have gone through your community leadership development program? It is not as active as I would like it to be. Once in a while, we will all get together and bring in an outside speaker to talk with us. I would like to meet maybe once a quarter and have a speaker come in and continue some of this education. We’ve noticed all over in watching leadership programs flourish—and they do—that the alumni are so busy. Once they leave that program, they are back out there, they are working and all of them are full-time career people and have families so they have their hands full. They’re doing just what we hoped they would do. We are an educational program, not necessarily an organization someone would belong to. I know a lot of programs do have alum groups that do some very special activities. A lot of programs have youth leadership programs through the school systems and other ways. I’m sure a lot of them look at youth issues, such as teen pregnancy and things like that. Most of them look at local government and some of the things we look at. It gives young people a heads-up on get- What advice would you give to a public power community that wanted to start a community leadership development program—what steps should they take? I’m willing to talk with anyone who is interested. One of the first things is to find a pool of people who are interested—probably already some of them are leaders—someone from the chamber, someone from your Cooperative Extension Service, someone who is already serving as an elected official. You get about seven or eight people together and share with them what you can teach people, what you can show them, how they can network and get to know other people in the community. These good minds will get together probably once every few weeks and you’ll get it going. You’ve got to have that one key person who will pull all this together, who will tend to all the duties and make all the appointments, arrange all the meetings, keep up with things in the community. Different communities do it different ways. Some have someone at the Chamber who does this. I volunteered at first, then they paid me a little salary. This is something I wanted to do. I did it for about 15 years and every year I learned and it was so helpful to me. There’s [always] someone in that community who would like to get involved in this. You’ve also got to have a steering committee to keep that involvement. Each year we appoint someone from the class to serve on this committee—our steering committee or board of directors, or whatever you call it. They keep it going. ❚ Anne Grady can be reached at grady@AMEA.com. JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2008 13 http://www.APPAnet.org
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