Reclaiming Our Friendly Community session generates new ideas for local civility-building
A successful Reclaim Our Friendly Community event co-hosted by the Civility Project and United as Neighbors took place on January 11 2025, generating important new ideas for how to help the local Newberg/Dundee community grwo stronger and more constructive relationships across political divides.
Of the 35 who attended, fewer than 1/4 were people who have been active volunteers in organizing and hosting events for the Civility Project or United as Neighbors.
We hoped to get a few good ideas from the group for now ways to promote connection and cooperation across political and other divisions in the community. The conversation was great, and the results very promising.
After we described initiatives already underway — Civility Pledge, Community Conversations, co-hosting candidate forums, candidate get togethers (to get to know each other better), and a booth at the last three Newberg Old Fashioned Festivals — we invited attenders to brainstorm more ideas. This produced of a list of 18 potential projects.
The group then honed that list down to nine:
Cultural Interaction / Multilingual Language Learning Practice
Create opportunities for people to practice languages they are learning by conversing, playing, studying, and watching videos together.Kids Events/ Civility Lesson Plans or Games
Supporting cross-cultural and cross-ideological games cooperative learning experiences in schools to help build understanding and encourage students to see their differences as gifts.Moderated meetings to discuss important public or neighborhood issues.
Prepare a team of people trained to serve as moderators for community discussions of controversial public issues. Patterned in part after a similar initiative by Citzens4Community in Sisters, Oregon, this would give members of the public a chance to express their own views, and listen carefully to others’ views, in a more flexible and successful setting than the stilted format of formal public hearings.5 K Walk for All Ages
This is a specific example of a much larger range of possible fun activities designed to draw people from across our political divisions to just enjoy being with each other. The advantages of a walk (rather than a run) include broader range of potential participation, and the ability to carry on conversations while walking.Formal forensic-style debates, which would demonstrate the value of learning both sides of a question well enough to advocate for either side, and would help voters be better able to assess of arguments they hear from candidate.
Hosts/moderators for individual difficult conversations between individuals: inspired by a federal judge in Alabama who ordered two bickering lawyers to go out to dinner together: we could prepre local people prepared to serve as host to help individuals in our community who need to sit down and talk through their disagreements.
Civility Observers: have a team who would take turns observing in person local governing bodies (county commissions, city councils, school and park boards, etc). These CO’s would note instances when members of these bodies did especially well at expressing and listening to their differences of opinion. The observers could then thank these officials publicly for their stewardship of their disagreements.
Echo Chambers escapes: Encourage people to escape from their echo chambers by reading/listening to/having conversations with people who disagree with them.
These ideas will be the focus of a follow-up planning meeting on Thursday evening, January 23, at 6:30 PM at the Newberg Drop-in Center at 504 E. First Street.
