Blog
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City Share Mini-Conference: Eighteen People, Six Cities, Two Days, Big Work Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Chattanooga Stand and CreateHere are pleased to announce a City Share Mini-Conference, to be held February 18-19. Featuring innovators from six cities across three different countries, this event will draw on the energy around current City Share conversations, with techniques and methodologies focused on how informed citizen engagement can make cities—ours and others—stronger and more prosperous.
City Share is rooted in the concept of citizens being able to come together, share ideas, and make real change. Today, that includes a bi-monthly discussion series hosted the first and third Wednesday of every month, open to the public with lunch provided. Thus far, this series has been a small, citywide endeavor, with speakers from around the country offering insights in community development. Now is the time to engage an even larger audience, locally and abroad.
CreateHere has a growing reputation as a catalyst for community development through initiatives based in arts, economy, and culture. Most recently, we’ve had the honor to work closely with Stand, the world’s largest community visioning survey. CreateHere works to find meaningful solutions to local issues through collaboration and idea-generation, and the City Share Mini-Conference allows us to work with diverse groups, including participants from Charlottesville, Chicago, Knoxville, Memphis, Wichita, Windsor, and the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), based in London. Together, we’d like to create a fertile ground for seeding new ideas around the world.
“Bringing together all of these participants is going to be incredibly exciting and it’s going to help facilitate an increasingly vital conversation on place-based change,” says Justin Langlois, research director of Broken City Lab, “thereby strengthening this already active and engaged network of like-minded cohorts across the continent and now the world.”
“With the Mini-Conference, we hope that the participants will develop a model for their community, and bring it back home,” says Helen Davis Johnson, CreateHere’s co-founder and Creative Strategist. “We believe in the pact between neighbors and friends who can make communities better places to live through hard work and dedication, and look forward to seeing participants take the ideas from this conference and turn them into action back home. We hope to learn from participants, learn from each other, and give back to other cities.”
For more information on the Mini-Conference, visit http://cityshareconference.org.
