Daviess County’s civic culture studied
The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation will release a report 17 months in the making next week that intends to aid the community in better understanding how residents see and experience Owensboro-Daviess County, and the key areas that need to be addressed to strengthen the community’s civic culture.
The Greater Owensboro Leadership Institute partnered on the report, which Harwood Institute founder Rich Harwood will discuss at Thursday’s Rooster Booster breakfast before the full report — Building a Better Owensboro: A New Path Forward for Owensboro-Daviess County — is released at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at Brescia University’s Field Center-Duffy Auditorium.
“When the Greater Owensboro Leadership Institute was created almost two years ago, part of our focus is to convene the community and to increase our civic capacity,” said Stacy Edds-Ellis, the institute’s executive director. “Working with the Harwood team seemed like a perfect fit to move us forward as a community in those areas. Our role is we’re ready to cultivate and unleash the community spirit that we’ve heard about in these conversations, and we look forward to the great work ahead, bringing people together on issues that matter.”
This wasn’t a typical public opinion survey where you get people on the phone for 15 minutes and ask them quick questions,” Harwood said. “These are really in-depth conversations so people could talk about how they really see things and what they want moving forward. We also did 36 in-depth interviews with community leaders from across the county. When I say community leaders, I mean everyone from elected officials and nonprofit leaders to folks in the healthcare system to folks in neighborhoods.”
Harwood said the heart of the report is gaining a better understanding of the community’s civic culture, which is not the same as culture wars.
“This is a really in-depth view of how people experience living in the county, and the other thing we are looking at is what is the civic strength of the community,” he said. “We have a framework that has nine factors that are in the report, where we can gauge the civic strengths of the community, how people work together and do things together. And I think that’s really critical. The biggest predictor of whether or not communities move forward is not simply their strategies, initiatives and programs. As important as those are, it’s the health of the civic culture. We spent a lot of time talking about what is the health of Owensboro’s civic culture.”
Harwood said improving the community’s civic culture is critical to bridging the divide that defines the culture wars.
“The healthier the civic culture is, is a way to combat culture wars,” he said. “You have leaders that people trust, organizations that bring people together to work across dividing lines; what are the shared norms of the community, ways in which people interact? There are real concerns about those. What is the sense of shared purpose in the community?”
Harwood said the cultural division in the community is clear in the report and that it must addressed for the community to move forward.
There’s great pride in the community, it’s very family oriented, faith based, where people help one another, and those are all real positives,” he said. “But there’s a restlessness in the community that the community is in danger of stagnating, and it’s very hard to move things forward because the community is fragmented, people act in silos, and there is a tendency in the community to fix things by putting band-aids on them as opposed to going to the underlying concerns that need to be addressed.
“There is a fear in the community about having hard conversations, but you can’t move forward without having hard conversations in the community. It’s that plain and simple. That’s going to have to be addressed if the community wants to move forward. We have to reduce fragmentation, we have to get rid of the silos, we have to have the hard conversations, we have to get people working with a greater sense of shared purpose, and we’ve got to move from putting band aids on things to addressing underlying concerns.”
Harwood said the report is not a scorecard like many indexes that are released. It’s about where the community is today and areas it can improve.
From there, the real work begins.
“This report is not the end; this is the beginning for us also in Owensboro,” he said. “We’re going to be working with the community for the next couple to a few years on how to take action on what’s in the report. I’m not interested in just handing in a report and walking away. That happens too often. The report is meant to be a catalyst for helping the community move forward.
“We’re not consultants. We’re not going to tell people what to do. But we are going to build the capacity of the community to address things.”
By Scott Hagerman Messenger- Inquirer