RE: How do Local Governments Inspire Community Engagement and Perform Public Outreach? Pierce County, Washington State
@meowzinator I provide free community improv classes in Austin at a local rec center and have been doing it for the past three years on a weekly basis. I recently met up with the Park & Recs city wide program manager to begin the process of becoming a vendor so that Park & Rec programs from around the city can hire my organization to provide services.
In short, you can only get so much from a website. The reality is that there's just too much information to handle, and city workers are often overworked and underpaid. Keeping this in mind (the reality), you need to have patience and consistency with your approach. I think you are on the right path with attaining as much knowledge as possible, just know that you have to be prepared to work your ass off to get noticed.
From my experience, my best advice would be to meet with someone in person. You likely will not get much feedback via email. My second best advice would be to start doing what you want to do NOW. There's always a way to start doing what you want now. If it requires money to start, then it'll likely take a long time to get anywhere as the process of receiving a grant is another level of work.
The city supports people who are taking action and doing things for the community. Keep that in mind. You'll get a positive response if you have actions to show.
I hope this helps! I'm excited for you! Keep at it and you will find the way.
Thanks for sharing here. I'd love to hear your thoughts about my recent post: Do The Little Things In Life Really Matter?
Thank you so much! I hope to prove though, that a website isn't much considering we have several dedicated to other services related to bringing business and money into the city. For example, the economic impact website. It isn't just this I plan to talk about, but the fact that many informational materials required for the county to receive federal funding from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development are hard to find and the documents that are available just aren't up to par with the legal federal requirements, literally some of the documents totally skip several key requirements.
I really appreciate your support and encouragement it's inspiring to hear someone else's story about creating community impact and I hope down the road we can do business together. I am definitely going to work as hard as I can to start taking action now. I am still working on building my confidence up but people like you help me feel better about what I hope to acheive. I really can't thank you enough for your comment, and I will check out your article now!
Thank you again,
Zamara!
Zamara I am truly excited for you. We need more people who have the motivation, drive, and guts to weed through the depths of these oftentimes confusing and old systems in order to discover their limitations and offer new a better solutions! There's so much value in that. The huge realization I have had, especially in working with the city, is that we have much more power than we think. Put politics aside and just go straight to the source. You can actually make real change there. You're on the right path!