My pastor, Dr. Rev. David Jefferson, held a small town hall meeting in our church.  My hope was to meet with residents and discuss what was going on in the City, to hear their concerns and ideas and to share with them what I thought were our current challenges and how I thought we would meet them.

It turned out to be an even better forum than I imagined.  Rev. Jefferson solicited questions from people in advance, had them on cards and acted as a moderator.  After I opened up the dialogue, he asked question after question and then allowed more from the audience.  It was such a good forum that we all decided to do it more frequently and to hopefully televise them to allow more people to benefit from the exchange.

I came away with one powerful thought (and an assignment for my team):  so many of the people were not aware of many of the services, programs and opportunities that the City has created for them.  We publicize them in many ways — from our website, to mailings, to press conferences, but we are clearly still not doing enough to make the public aware of critical opportunities and many of the great successes our City is achieving.  My team and I will have to brainstorm on ways to get more information into the hands of residents and find ways to challenge residents to better avail themselves of some of the avenues to information that already exist.

The worst kind of poverty is lack of knowledge.  Information is indeed power and in the information age, our City and residents must become masters of empowerment.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.