Bison, SD

By Dan Kvale

The Horizons II project had about 75 participants at the Bentley Building last Saturday for the noon meal and prioritization of ideas. 

The second phase of the project has come to an end and nine ideas to reduce poverty in Bison needed to be organized and placed in an order of importance by a larger group of citizens. For the past two months, 30 volunteers have been learning about ways to reduce poverty and defining what poverty means to them.  They then generated lists of ways to reduce poverty in our community and submitted the  nine best ideas to this larger group to vote on. The participants enjoyed a shrimp scampi and roast beef dinner catered by the Main Street Bakery [a new Bison business].  They then listened to proposals for each of the ideas. Tammy Prelle and Heidi Collins presented on town cleanup, new housing and planned social activities.  Dan Kvale presented on assisted living center, Internet businesses and promotion of hunting and outdoor sports.  Kelly Serr and Kevin Weishaar presented support of local businesses, organization of lodging resources and improved Signage on the highway and within the community. The presentations were followed by a question and answer forum.  The results of the prioritization votes were:

1. Internet business
2. New housing
3. Local business
4. Assisted living center
5. Lodging
6. Town cleanup
7. Signage
8. Promotion of outdoor sports
9. Planned social activities

The next phase of the Horizons II project is to train community leaders to use the idea of an Internet business to enter a plan and action phase.  After the first project is complete, each of the ideas will be worked on in turn.  Voters also chose a short term project idea, which was the town cleanup.

Three individuals will attend a training session for the Leadership Plenty phase of the project.  The three trainers will then return and train 25 participants in community visioning and planning.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 4:41 pm and is filed under 01. Poverty: Knowledge and Awareness, 07. Leadership: Action, 09. Community: Knowledge and Awareness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.