Meanwhile, over at the F.U.N...

Earlier this autumn, I made contact with one of the most extraordinary people I've had the pleasure of meeting since taking this 'town halls' notion out of my head and pushing it out into the real world. 

Her name is Janice Brown, and she looks after Communications at the Federation of Urban Neighbourhoods. But she's also on the Durand Neighbourhood Association's Board of Directors. 

From the start of our correspondence, through our coffee face-to-face, the lead-up to our inaugural town hall and post-event, Janice was helpful and encouraging. I'm so glad synchronicity was at play throughout. And I'm glad there are Janice Browns out there helping to steward the needs of our community and neighbourhood associations. 

Here's a guest article I contributed to their newsletter.  (A special shout-out to my brother, who gave some editorial input when I was faffing about.)


With a View to a New Sense of Duty
During the last century’s two World Wars, it was common to be encouraged to ‘do your patriotic duty, your country needs you’. Well, it’s my belief that we need to be considering something similar: ‘do your civic duty, your community needs you’.

Town Halls Hamilton is an initiative meant to help facilitate this, providing a forum for civic duty, helping to promote doing what we all can do to ensure that the Quality of Life where we live most resembles what we most crave, Town Halls Hamilton is attempting to change the landscape on the citizenry side of local governance. We’re looking to establish new traditions, to change mindsets, to provide some gentle nudges to get people to see their roles in the process a little differently. To redefine ‘civic duty’.

Hopefully in the end, in reshaping the topography, they’ll go through a similar transformation. We want residents of Hamilton to find it a more natural thing to participate and be more involved in and to eventually ‘own’ their governance in ways that go beyond voting every four years. (At least the meagre 40% of eliegible voters currently casting ballots.)

“I’m inclined to think elections are overrated. If you vote for a candidate once every four years but don’t get involved in the meantime, it doesn’t really matter much who you vote for. It’s so important for citizens to: a) elect councillors who will allow themselves to be engaged, and keep up their end of that engagement between elections.”

This portion of an email exchange with Hamilton’s foremost civic activism blogger –Ryan McGreal of ‘Raise the Hammer’– was the second epiphanal moment for me regarding town halls and their potential to effect change. (The first was the unfolding of the health-care debate in the US during the summer of 2009, the broadcast of town halls featuring truly impassioned exchanges.) 

The result was the founding of ‘Town Halls Hamilton‘, Hence my conviction about getting people together in a room, setting a particular tone, and talking.

And so on November 10th, Hamiltonians will be taking part in Town Halls Hamilton’s inaugural effort: ‘An Evening With Ward 2 Councillor Jason Farr’.

While town halls are nothing new –we’ve never claimed to be reinventing the wheel– we believe that the approach we’re intending to take, one that’s moderated, one that’s civil and well-mannered, as well as being grounded in a modern, social- media mode provides an abundance of possibilities to gradually ‘increase the relationship of engagement between residents and their Councillors’.

And from there, the sky’s the limit. Which will make that shifting landscape all the more interesting to view.