On December 4th, Portland Public Library’s Choose Civility Initiative hosted a public forum on the topic of Welcoming : Energizing Community. Organized as a World Cafe conversation, facilitators from Institute for Civic Leadership walked the almost 50 participants through three sets of questions, with the purpose of helping to share many perspectives while deepening the conversation.
The three questions asked:
1) On a scale of 1-10, how welcoming do you find Portland and why?
2) How does your rating shape your community engagement?
3) If we envision a Most Welcoming city, what might we highlight and what might we change?
If you have answers to these questions, please leave comment below or send them to simmons@portland.lib.me.us
Themes from the break-out session are inspiring and encourage more conversations about how we move to action!
People seek more opportunities to connect with others… and especially strangers who might share a new way of thinking about the common good. Participants agreed that Portland offers significant opportunities to be among people but deeper interactions can feel awkward or discouraged.
Welcoming is an active practice… a truly welcoming community does more than invite people to the table, it encourages a cultural literacy among all members of the community, institutionalizes best practices for encouraging the greatest level of public participation and
enhances shared public space where interaction is normal, easy, supported and encouraged.
A shared vision for a common good needs to be articulated… we likely share more in common than we might realize, but many experience incivility as an effort to separate us and emphasize our differences.
Civility in the Political Process is Important… Our political discourse should be friendly, welcoming and respectful of dissent and agreement.
Choose Civility Portland aims to build momentum on these suggestions by hosting public conversations on important community topics, skill building workshops for engaging in Democracy, and by maintaining and amplifying our commitment to the Library as a space where interaction and integration occur.
For those of you who missed it, Startup Weekend was amazing, with 90 or so entrepreneurial folks getting down to business for 72 fast paced hours! They pitched, they formed teams, they planned, they researched, they met with business coaches, they pivoted, they pitched again…all the while eating great food, drinking copious amounts of coffee, networking and having as much fun as possible while totally focused on creating a minimum viable product in just a weekend with a team you’ve only just met!
For those thinking of starting a business, learn how the Portland Public Library can help you! First stop would be to take a look at PPL’s new website, specifically the ‘business topic’ page. To learn more about how to utilize the resources you find here check out this Prezi: Business Reference @ Portland Public Library. Last, don’t forget that in addition to our awesome online resources we still have plenty of books here at PPL, see our list of suggested booksfor startups.
Welcome to the new PPL website. We like to think of it as a Virtual Branch!
It used to be that websites were just layers of pages under a header of some sort that over time became more and more dense. For an information organization like the library, the more pages meant the better the site. What has become much clearer for PPL over the last 18 months is that the website is our virtual branch — complete with its own unique opportunities and challenges, like a physical library location. It is also a unique opportunity to create a way to recognize our users as being many kinds of people and needing to be served in many different ways.
We hope that this new online library environment and experience is exciting and productive for you and just maybe you’ll find what you seek and be exposed to the unexpected!
Please tell us how we can make it better by dropping us a note at web@portland.lib.me.us.
We thank our friends at Vont Web Marketing, our partner in conceiving and creating this site, and the Sam L. Cohen Foundation without whose support we could not have completed this effort.
