Rebound Owen Sound gathers to share a how-to guide on community engagement.

Rebound Owen Sound is on a mission of renewal and invigoration.

They'd like to see our community not only as viable, for the entire population, but desirable – a community of hearts and minds, much more than ghettos and lines.

Navigating that change is a challenge, there are shoals to get hung upon, and swirling eddies of confusion. That challenge is often a barrier to civic participation, even at its most basic level – calling city hall to get something fixed on your street, or wondering how to find neighbours also interested in making things better and then finding the resources to help build your vision.

Rebound's been thinking about that, and they invited three engaged community leaders to help rewrite the map Wednesday, May 24, at the Harmony Centre in Owen Sound.

A video of the event can be found here.

City councillor and community activist Jon Farmer runs through how to actually "call City Hall"  by using the current website and administrative structure. It's often a frustrating experience for repeat users, and a fog bank for first-time users. They're working on it of course, but it's still pretty easy to send enquiries to unresponsive dead ends, and to generate hundreds of unsorted choices to simple search requests on the city's online portal. Mr. Farmer was glad to share some visual representations, and some shortcuts to getting a response when you call city hall.

Engagement comes from city staff as well, but their abilty to engage is often eroded by understandable frustration expressed as personalized anger. Michelle Palmer is the city's senior manager strategic initiatives and operational effectiveness. She comes from a project mangement background where public engagement of all stakeholders is the focus of a project, not a checkbox on the final review form.

Citizens – plain ordinary citizens – did this. Did that. And that, and that. Anne Finlay-Stewart made a line of bunting with more than a century of citizen-inspired projects we all enjoy and make use of, and conserve for future generations, and it's a pretty long line. Ms. Finlay-Stewart has a long record of helping the voiceless be understood, currently she's the editor and publisher of our own Owen Sound Hub. She points out that it's not just elected officials who get things done, often it's private citizens with great ideas that spark a whole community to come together to support a project or initiative.

Engagement sparks engagement as Rebound Owen Sound shows how to make it easier.

Once they're gone, they're gone. Anne Finlay-Stewart puts the hard sell on Girl Guide Cookies (they're vegan!!) and supporting local initiatives.

– by Hub staff
David Galway