General Session:
Getting Your Community Ready

Not every community is fully prepared to embrace new voices in planning for its future. Some need help before they can move forward. This session introduces key questions that communities need to ask before they get started: Who is currently involved in community leadership? What voices are missing? How can we get them involved? The session also introduces the LeadershipPlenty curriculum and provides tips on recruiting a diverse group of community participants.

LeadershipPlenty

LeadershipPlenty® is a copyrighted leadership training program designed by the Pew Partnership for Civic Change to prepare citizens to successfully address local problem-solving priorities and leadership challenges. This session will prepare you to offer the nine-module curriculum and will give you access to all needed training materials

• Gae Broadwater, Kentucky State University
  
• Hank Cothran, University of Florida
  
• Phil Scharre, Tennessee Valley Authority
  
• Bo Beaulieu, Southern Rural Development Center
  
• Yvette Robinson, Virginia State University
  
• Suzanne Morse, Pew Partnership for Civic Change
  
• Linda Hoke, Southern Growth Policies Board
• Gwen Whiting, Pew Partnership for Civic Change

Concurrent Sessions

Do you hear stories of angry, frustrated citizens who feel they have little power to influence important decisions affecting their lives? Politicians and media spokes persons often reassure themselves by characterizing citizen frustration as intolerance, ignorance or even apathy, instead of looking deeper at the desire of regular people to express their views on public issues but believing they do not have a venue to do so.

Making choices about how to deal with community issues is difficult because different people favor different approaches, and the options for action may contradict or conflict with one another. The common public problems that confront families and communities can best be understood and addressed by the citizens themselves deliberating together. Public deliberation is a means to evaluate consequences of various options, understand the views of others, and find a shared sense of direction---common ground for action. This workshop will introduce the concept of public deliberation and how public deliberation can be used to address challenging community problems.

• Renée Daugherty, Oklahoma State University
  
• Linda Hoke, Southern Growth Policies Board
  
• Sue Williams, Oklahoma State University
  
• Hank Cothran, University of Florida

Across the nation, the desire to mitigate local problems and ameliorate socioeconomic disparities is increasingly recognized by state policy makers, local elected officials, and the citizenry at large. Moreover, the need to attract and retain sufficient levels of human capital in rural areas to improve the overall quality of life is often a major priority for many communities. One way that local leaders, community developers, and Cooperative Extension personnel can assist in the community and economic development agenda of rural communities is by facilitating a community's local planning process, a process commonly referred to as community-based planning. Community-based planning is a local comprehensive planning process that is designed to build, strengthen, and support community structures. The overall intent of community-based planning is to develop an inclusive plan that individual and associational actors can utilize to guide local community development initiatives. The process directly engages community leaders and the broad-based citizenry in an active effort to move their community from today's reality to tomorrow's possibilities. With an understanding of community and the techniques involved in the process of community-based planning, local leaders, community developers, and Cooperative Extension personnel can become actively involved at the community level and serve as a resource in moving forward the planning-to-action process.

• Gene Theodori, Texas A&M University
• Deborah Tootle, Louisiana State University
• Greg Taylor, Texas A&M University