Visioning: Your Community Needs You

What's Happened?

On June 10th, the Grand Coulee Area Chamber of Commerce sponsored a community meeting at the Senior Center in Grand Coulee so community people could take control and offer ideas to reduce poverty and improve the community for everyone.

The Horizons Project is moving into the Visioning phase. The article Community center meeting calls for another bigger one --Momentum builds for a new facility

in the Star Online notes:

"The goal of the meeting is to gain an approval in principlel for the community center goal from as many facets of the community as possible.

Items up for discussion will include considering:

• what types of facilities should be included in the overall plan, such as a swimming pool/aquatic center, small convention facility, daycare, gym, skate rink,

• possible location sites,

• funding possibilities."


What's Happening?

Community members will address the ideas from the Action Forum and move forward with skills developed at Leadership Plenty to form partnerships (like with the Chamber of Commerce, Hospital, Government, etc.), form a 501c3, and apply for grants to achieve the community's vision.

Next week, Wednesday June 17 at 6:30 p.m. at the Grand Coulee Senior Center, come as a community member to take the next steps in moving towards a common vision for Nespelem, Elmer City, Coulee Dam, Grand Coulee, and Electric City.

Please bring your ideas and join the future.

Click image to download flyer.

HORIZONS: Community Leaders Reducing Poverty
Working together to move from poverty to prosperity for all.


Mary Schilling at 633 3033 or email at mschilling@gcdsd.org


Learn more about the Horizons program http://horizons.wsu.edu/

An Opportunity for Thanks

From Leadership Plenty

Jesse, Nate, and Amanda thanked Cathy McMorris-Rodgers for her help and guidance in our local school issue.

Congressional aides, state senators and representatives, federal authorities, and school officials had gathered in our local schools on November 12th to tour and talk about the questionable status of our local school facilities. This is indeed one of our local needs as those officials agreed that:

• The district needs new schools.

• School building funding is difficult.

School district board Chair Donna DeWinkler, and Sheila Stalp, deputy director for U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, who represents Washington’s fifth congressional district in the nation’s capitol, arranged the tour and discussion.

Our HORIZONS Leadership Plenty Team took the opportunity to thank U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers after she spoke at noon on December 3rd to the attendees at the HORIZONS Conference in Spokane at the Washington State University campus.

For more information on the school building issue, see this article in The Star newspaper.

McMorris-Rodgers Recognizes HORIZONS

From Leadership Plenty

Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, Representative for Eastern Washington, spoke to the participants of the Leadership Plenty Training Conference in Spokane.

She acknowledged the excellent work of local communities whose grass-roots organization has been driven by the HORIZONS grant and training.

She recognized the local efforts in communities, such as Northport and Springdale, whose area residents understand that each person holds a capacity for leadership. These community members added their own leadership role and invited more members to share their leadership to solve the needs of each community. Community parks, farmers markets, and community centers were the result of ordinary citizens believing they could make change for the better, thus allowing extraordinary results.

Representative McMorris-Rodgers pointed to the possibilities for growth in Eastern Washington based on what already exists: excellent medical records facilitation and new energy resources, as examples. By building from what we have using the people resources of communities, our prospects for the future will grow. The HORIZONS Project proves this to be true. Click on “Community Mobilization” in the sidebar for recent news of our community to see how our residents have begun the HORIZONS Way of grass-roots solutions to community needs.

Please come to the next meeting, December 11th, 5:30-8:30 PM, in the Community Church in Coulee Dam to help begin our action process for our community.

Public Relations Training: Take Control

From Leadership Plenty

Pamela Roberts of Washington State University, Jefferson County Extension 4-H Youth Development shared her expertise on blogging to the advanced bloggers of the HORIZONS Project. We learned to take control of our shots to create a story and history of our progress to eliminate poverty.

Photo credit: Pamela Roberts, Horizons-PR.