LANCissues at the Congress, 10/9/04 - a report

Dear LANC Stakeholders:

By all accounts, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Citywide Issues Group workshop at the Congress of NCs on October 9th was a big success.

Ken Marsh of the Mar Vista Community Council did a wonderful job producing a new flyer and brought hundreds of copies that were distributed liberally both to the workshop participants and at the general assembly.

The flyer is very clean and succinctly features a general description of our group's efforts as well as the LANCissues website and e-group info. It's a tool we'll be able to reproduce and use for quite some time (here it is in PDF format for anyone to download and distribute: LANCissues FLYER).

Additionally, Heinrick Keifer of the Historic Highland Park NC produced a simple and very tasteful PowerPoint presentation based on the flyer and some additional information.

The room was a comfortable space and among other amenities had a screen for projection, microphones and an easel with a large pad and marking pens (similar to what's been provided in the past).

Heinrick and I led the session which began with him running the PowerPoint while I described a bit about our mission, history, philosophy, how to find us on the web and when / how we meet (again, all on the new flyer).

From there we asked the group to express some of the issues they considered timely. Heinrick wrote them all out on the large pad, and as we usually do we posted them up on the wall as we went along.

NOTE: Steve Twining of the Bel-Air Beverly Crest NC ended up with the complete list of issues, which I've added to the website: Congress Issues. He also has the sign in sheets from which we'll add currently non-existing members to the LANCissues e-group list.

We then had those assembled vote on all the issues that had been mentioned (to rank them) and thus selected the top few as possible topics for discussion during the remainder of the session.

In the end the first issue chosen, the Mayor's Budget Survey Process, which had easily won first place in the voting, engendered quite a lively discussion, and the second most popular topic, the LAX expansion, filled the time remaining.

Perhaps a couple dozen stakeholders participated in all, though some floated in and out of the room. Many of our Citywide Issues Group members stopped in before and after the session to lend support, but actually attended other workshops being held at the same time.

I hope we'll be hearing from some of them in the near future ...

Finally, DONE had provided evaluation forms for the workshop which all the stakeholders completed. These were collected at the end of the meeting. Participants were asked to rank their opinions of how the session went in 10 or 12 categories. We consistently earned the highest marks.

Yours in service,

Bill Murray

Arroyo Seco NC
www.ASNC.us