 I wanna welcome everybody tonight. It's a great crowd to our reimagining participation from town meeting to year round engagement. My name is Lisa McCrory, and on behalf of the Bethel Town Meeting and Community Engagement Committee, I wanna welcome everybody here. I also wanna mention quickly that we met like this once before. It's been about eight years since we did this and I know that the flavor and the energy is a little different than what it was eight years ago, but I think we're gonna hear some of the same stuff, but probably the same stuff at the end. So we're really excited to have Susan Clark back here. I'm gonna pass the mic. Well, first I wanna recognize all the different done individuals and organizations involved. We have the White River Valley Middle School as well as Misha, who's been gracious enough to provide the food for us today. So White River Valley Supervisory Union, Community Conversation, the Bethel Equity and Inclusion Committee, and I think those are all the co-sponsors of this event tonight. I'm gonna now pass the mic over to Pierre, who'd like to say a few words. So those of you I have not had a chance to meet personally, my name is Pierre Laplonde. I'm the middle school principal here at White River Valley Middle School. I wanna just openly welcome you to this forum. I hope you pay attention to the ones we have in the future. We very much appreciate you coming and being part of a conversation that is truly important to the community. The benefit of this kind of an event is it's not school-driven. I get to do the easy part. I get to nod and smile while we feed you, welcome you, and clean up afterwards. It's truly the topics, the energy comes from those folks that have been recognized and really the community you all live in. And I very much appreciate you showing up today and I'm looking out at a very diverse crowd of people and I hope tonight's conversation is civil and drives further conversation. So again, thank you very much for showing tonight. And next we'll have our own speaker, Nick, the inclusion committee. Hey, y'all. Hi. I'm Orange. Welcome, everybody. So glad you're here. Thank you so much to all the organizers. So I'm from the Equity and Inclusion Committee. We are a town committee here that is appointed by the select board. We do a bunch of different things. One of our big new ongoing things that we've been doing this year is an Equity and Inclusion Book Club where we get together and we read a book together that's written by a BIPOC identified author. We have all different genres that we've explored so far and it's a free program. Books are provided, meals, childcare is provided. So if you're interested in that, come chat with me. We meet on the fourth Tuesday of the month on Zoom and you can find our information on the town of Bethel's website and our agendas are posted there. We also organized last year's Juneteenth event and we're doing some other events throughout town. So yes, thank you so much for being here. This is an awesome turnout and I will pass it. Next up is Karen Bixler. She'd like to make a Native Land Acknowledgement. So good evening. I'd like to open this evening's event with a land acknowledgement. For those of you unfamiliar with this practice, a land acknowledgement is a statement about whose land we are on. For us, that would be the Abinaki or Abinaki, past, present and future who have stewarded this land since the beginning of time and will continue to steward it into the future. An acknowledgement is a first step in recognizing the reality of our history but without consequences, it rings hollow. I invite us all to dig deeper into our history and to intercept some of the falsehoods with which we were socialized. Tonight, as we ponder ways to improve our democratic practices, let us remember that there were thriving democracies on this land before the arrival of our European settlers. Thank you. Again, for everyone being here, a couple of little notes. Bathrooms are right outside the door to the right. In case you need those. We do have child care, but I think that's all been taken care of. It's been a bit of a journey here with the meeting committee starting back at least 10, 12 years ago and even earlier than that in some form. We started trying to, our initial focus was town meeting, making it more open and accessible both in location as well as information in our town report, which has improved greatly over the years. Two of the driving people who are the driving force behind our committee, unfortunately tragically you're no longer with us, Victoria Weber and Davis DeMock, who as we all know, passed away a little less than a year ago. And they were really what drove our committee, the heart and soul of our committee. And through COVID, naturally we didn't meet, town meeting didn't happen. 2023 happened and town meeting did happen, but we were really not ready for it as a committee. And that kind of showed in some areas. But since then, we realized that lacking and the committee has reformed with new energy. And I should mention too, the town, the Bethel operators manual, that was a project also spearheaded by Victoria and Davis. It was a five year project. It came out in March of 2020 when things shut down. So it was a little hard getting it distributed. We have several copies here tonight. It's a good, it's basically a handbook of all things Bethel. Again, it was produced in 2020. We'll be ready to do an update in a couple of years. We're trying to do that in five years. But if you haven't got a copy of that, grab one tonight. There's more at the town clerk's office as well. So I think that's the only bit of groundwork. Oh, so what we'll be doing tonight, we have a very interesting guest speaker that is actually their second time to Bethel. We're excited to have her give her a presentation. That will be in two parts. In between those two we'll be having, we'll be break out into smaller groups, having some discussion. We'll be leading you in that. And then we'll come back. She'll give the second part of her discussion. We'll have another breakout and then we'll wrap it up at the end. So we're gonna try to get that done by eight o'clock. We're running a few minutes behind schedule. But anyway, that's a brief outline of what we're gonna have. So let me introduce to you, and I'm very excited and privileged and proud to introduce her to you. She's a writer and educator focusing on community sustainability and citizen participation. An award-winning radio commentator, former talk show co-host. In addition to slow democracy, she's co-author of All Those in Favour, Rediscovering the Secrets of Town Meeting and Community. She has served as communication director for the Vermont Natural Resources Council. Her community development work has included coordinating a rural grants program and directing a community activist network for the Northeastern US and Canada. And she has taught community development at the college level for several years. She, her democratic activism has earned her broad recognition, including the 2010 Vermont Secretary of States and during the Democracy Award. And, which resonates with me most, she serves as town moderator for her town, Middlesex, Vermont. So join me in giving her a warm, Bethel welcome, Susan Clark. Thank you so much. That is such a lovely welcome and quite detailed, like I'd forgotten I'd done some of those things. So thanks so much. And I am really excited to be here. I am excited to be in Bethel, the center of the universe of innovation, in so many ways, with your Bethel operators manual and your Bethel University and reimagining your downtown. I'm really, I'm just really honored to contribute given how much I know that your community means to you, to every person in this room. So just briefly, I'm curious, you know, who's here? How many people are here actually live in Bethel? Most of us, yes. Okay, so how many don't? Yeah, a few. Okay, what other towns are we from? Berry. Berry, uh-huh. Other towns? Gallus. Gallus, right up near me. Randolph. Randolph, all right. Great, so a smattering. How many serve on a board or committee in the town of Bethel? Oh, wow, impressive, all right, that's great. And how many serve on a board or committee in the school system? Excellent, all right, that's fantastic. How many attend town or school meeting at least sometimes? That's great. Okay, and what I won't ask, but you know, what's just as meaningful, have your kids gone through the school here? How many of you are caring for elderly relatives? What's your favorite season? What's your favorite history tidbit about this place? You know, what's the best place to hike or ski or swim around here? I'm not gonna ask, but I know that each of us inhabit our place in different ways and you're all bringing experiences to this conversation. So thanks again for that great introduction to me and let's see, hmm, what happened? It went away? Okay, we'll just watch Rebecca put in her password. So yes, you've mentioned that I'm a facilitator and a trainer, I do live in Middlesex. Researcher, co-author of this book Slow Democracy, which tells stories about communities across the US using local democracy to make a difference. This is the book, All Those in Favor, that I co-authored with Frank Bryan, sort of a reader's digest version of his 30-year study of town meetings, Vermont town meetings. And then I, okay, this is not a book, it's a comic book, but it is so cool and it was so much fun to help make, I just have to show it. It is available online at the Center for Cartoon Studies if you are ever interested in seeing a cartoon guide to Vermont democracy. This was through the Vermont Humanities Council and Vermont Secretary of State's office. So you can see a theme here, I'm a local democracy nerd, I'm sorry about that. And I have been asked to cover a dauntingly wide range of topics tonight. So we'll see what we can do. I'm gonna start by talking about the challenges we're facing in Vermont today in terms of our democracy. I'm gonna touch on some kind of wacky brain science that might help explain how we got here. We'll talk about how all of this relates to town meeting. And then after our discussion, we'll put it all together, what innovations we might bring to our current situation. So you mentioned I've been here before. I remember, it was December of 2014. And I remember because I took this photo that night, which I would never have done except that I just loved this sign so much. It made me so happy. I had to show it to my husband because it has some of my favorite things in it. It's got snow. It's got this beautiful sense of history, Bethel 1779. And then right next to, it says town meeting and right next to my name, it says dessert potluck. I was like, it just doesn't get any better than this in my mind. So in some ways, 2014 was yesterday. And it was also several lifetimes away. I do remember specifically being welcomed by Carl Russell and Carl had such a powerful soulful energy for your select board, as well as working on lots of local issues. He worked on conservation committee, ancient roads. So our work in communities is always connected over time. And I just really wanna celebrate those deep contributions that people make. One of the initiatives that came out of that convening was the Bethel operators manual. And my copy at home inside has a note to me from Victoria Weber, who gave so much time and expertise to this project. Now I know that Bethel lost Victoria and her husband Davis. So again, I want to acknowledge and celebrate how we are here building on these legacies. When I looked at your town reports, it showed me over the years that Bethel has lost and honored other special community members in those intervening years. And in towns the size of Vermont's, when we depend on our neighbors so much, we really feel it deeply. Each individual, each of us, each of you can make a legacy level different. So it's something that lays the groundwork for the conversations that we're having about democracy today. Obviously a lot can happen in 10 years. And if we zoom out from Bethel, there have been some other really fundamental changes in the past decade across Vermont's communities. Even if you just think about it, 2014, well, okay, that was before 2016. That was before 2020. There are a lot of things that happened. And in fact, today this is an enormously challenging moment for local democracy. It's kind of a perfect storm hitting us at the same time. So lots of challenges, I'm just gonna name a few of them. One key challenge is coming really from the national level. And I don't mean the national government, I mean nationalized narratives. We're hearing concerns about voter fraud, things like election fraud. We'll hear it again when in the coming election. And this might be a good time to mention, there's a woman named Amanda Ripley. She wrote a great book called High Conflict, if anybody's interested. She coined the term conflict entrepreneur. Conflict entrepreneur. These are partisans and media outlets who make it their business to frame issues in ways that make us not trust each other. They're so distrust because they actually, they benefit from polarization. And Vermont's not immune from these nationalized narratives, which it means that here in our local towns, you think about it, towns is where we do democracy, right? Our town clerk is our election official. Our ballot clerks are our neighbors. And this is where we vote. And that means that our towns are under intense scrutiny to ensure that democracy is secure. If you ask any town clerk, they will tell you election security has, ooh, it's gotten like way, way, way higher stakes in recent years. So that's attention. But simultaneously at the same time, we've seen this huge increase in awareness around diversity and equity and inclusion. National concerns about voter suppression. Americans have been experiencing this really high profile racial reckoning, as we all know, which of course is still ongoing. And while Vermont is still overwhelmingly white, we're quickly becoming more racially diverse. And we need to make our democratic spaces welcoming, accessible, not only across race, but across all differences, including new Americans, our LGBTQ neighbors, people of a variety of abilities and disabilities, socioeconomic differences, that the list goes on. But can you hear the sort of inherent tension here? We've got communities being pressured to prove how secure our democracy is. And at the same time, trying to make our democratic system more open than ever. So it's a dynamic that we have to think about. Another challenge, local democracy asks a lot of us and our communities need volunteers. Bethel, you guys took it on the chin during Irene. I do not need to tell you anybody here what, how volunteers have the lifeblood of our communities. Vermonters know that we can't just sit around and wait for FEMA, right? We don't. We step up. And Vermont does enjoy a really high level of social capital and that means trust, it means reciprocity, it means volunteerism. But social capital, it's like any kind of capital, right? It's an account that needs to be refilled. And in these repeated crises, like meteorological crises, which we are told we're gonna see more of, and political crises, which it seems to be sort of a permanent fixture these days, we're drawing down the capital. So in one way, it's great that our communities meet us and invite us and where they want our skills and talents. From chicken pie suppers to planning commissions to fast squads. Studies show that not only do these kind of collective community efforts enrich us personally, they make us less lonely. They're good for our psyches. They're good for our social lives. And they're one of the best ways to improve community resilience. But increasing income inequality is real and taking time to volunteer, it's increasingly difficult for working families. So how can we ensure that those community opportunities are rewarding and inviting and sustainable? And then finally, it's not news to you that Americans are losing faith in democracy. There was a recent survey that fewer than one in 10 Americans polled think that political ranker between average Americans is gonna decrease in the next decade. Nearly half of us think it's gonna increase. And this is more than a challenge. It's a crisis in terms of the need for civic skills. What structures and actions can we make sure are in place so that we can see and hear and understand each other and build bridges across our differences. And it's not just Bethel and Tons across the state. People have been asking these questions. So we want more. We want more democratic bias. It's gotta be inclusive. It's gotta be, at least some of the options have to be quick and easy to do. It's gotta be accessible. And we also want it to be great. We want great opportunities where we build trust and we hone the skills needed to maintain our local democracy. So there's a tension there. And here's the thing. When you've got a tension between two really good things, even when they're both good, we often end up hitting them against each other. The human brain loves, just loves a simple good versus evil narrative. And if I value this a little more and you value this a little more, we're gonna disagree with each other. And sadly, when discussions are framed as either or, it pits us against each other. Sometimes neighbor against neighbor. And it can tear communities apart. So those are some of the challenges that our local democracy is feeling. Oh, and by the way, while I'm naming worries, here comes another election year, right? Yes. So, just ended already. Some people I think are just tired. They're ready to give up on democracy altogether. But not us, not us. You came tonight here in Bethel. We are not gonna give up hope. We are actually gonna talk about some really useful tools that we can use in this difficult moment. And in figuring out how we're gonna move forward, I'm just gonna take a brief little foray into the amazing and amazingly frustrating human brain. Okay, so here's a great story. There was a study that was done, it was first done in 2006, very well known study, but it's been repeated many times since then with the same results. This is using brain science. Researchers wired up some voters to explore exactly what happens inside our brains when we receive new information, especially when we perceive that that new information does not fit our world view. So you got a group of self-described Republicans and self-described Democrats with these MRIs subjected to unflattering information about their own party's candidates. And according to their MRIs, when we're confronted with information that contradicted their biases, their brains actually under-processed the information. So the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for conscious reasoning, hardly even fired. And instead, it was the emotional circuits of the brain that lit up. So basically, participants' brains used emotion to ignore information that they didn't wanna hear but they couldn't discount intellectually. And remember, this is physical. This is a physiological reaction on all of us, left, right, center. There are social scientists like Jonathan Haidt who explains that this idea of us them, this mentality, it's largely innate. So identifying who's on my team and who isn't. It was really great. It gave us the survival advantage back when we were banding together in tribes for protection. Thank you very much, evolution, right? But as Haidt explains, many of our individual characteristics, so including whether we're drawn to change, we're excited about change or whether we prefer the status quo, that literally makes us more likely to be liberal or conservative. These aren't simply opinions. We're talking about significantly inherited qualities that make up our identities. And we're physiologically wired to defend them. Yikes. So if we live in a world where people, we wanna live in a world, let's say, where people can take in new information and find ways to move forward together, the easiest way is if we can frame our conversations in ways that don't challenge a person's identity. And then that takes patience, and it frankly takes a lot of big heartedness. It takes, you sort of almost have to break your heart open because here's a great, Catherine Schultz, the author of Being Wrong, she has a great TED talk on this. She says when we encounter someone that we disagree with, we often react on a three point scale. Okay, you're having a conversation, maybe a Thanksgiving with somebody that you disagree with. And your first reaction is the ignorance assumption, this person just needs more information. But then when you kindly share your facts and they still disagree, we move on to number two. They must be an idiot, right? Because they have all the information, you just gave it to them. They're just too stupid to see things my way. And if that turns out not to be true, what if that happens? If the person we disagree with has all the information and they turn out to be pretty smart. Then we move on to number three, the evil assumption. They know the truth perfectly well but they are distorting it on purpose for their own wicked reasons. And you'll notice that this ladder leaves no room for the most common of human realities, which is that intelligent people of good will sometimes disagree. And that in fact, the only solution, uncomfortable as it may be, is to sit down and hear each other out. And this is especially important right now at this moment in history because so many of today's hot topics like affordable housing, like school consolidation, like siting wind turbines, these are so complex that they are what analysts call wicked problems. A key trait of a wicked problem is that science can't give us just one right answer, partly because of those competing underlying values. And it sounds really hard. It just sounds almost impossible. But here's the thing. The world is full of stuff like this. Your daily life is full of what they call technically a polarity, which means two crucial, interdependent, but contradictory variables that have to coexist. What does that mean? Well, we navigate them every single day. Anybody hear a parent? All right, are you firm or are you flexible? Which one? Both, right? Sometimes you have to be firm. Sometimes you have to be flexible. It's like it depends on the situation. You navigate that every day. A good boss is both grounded and visionary, right? Organizations constantly have to embrace continuity and change. They have to think about both of those two things. And how about here in Vermont, right? Since 1788, we have functioned under a paradoxical motto. Anybody know Vermont's motto? Freedom and unity. Ever thought about that? The ultimate paradox. We walked in both. But if we were all unified, we would never be free, right? And if we were all truly free, we could not be unified. If we were truly free, we could not even fill a pothole. At least in New Hampshire, they know where they stand, right? Live, free, or die. So the trick is that with these things that they call polarities, the trick is that rather than thinking about solving them, pick one, either or, you have to think about managing them. You have to name and understand the competing values underneath, explore the trade-offs, and do that hard work of finding the best both and solution in each case. There's a great guy in Colorado, Martin Carcassani, he's a professor at Colorado State. And he says, you know what? Most of the time when we have a problem, we don't use that method. We use one of two methods. We either use expertise, like bringing the scientific expert, they will tell us what to do, right? Or we use activism. Let's organize a campaign. Our side just needs to win and that will solve everything. Which, by the way, it doesn't. Because if it's a win-lose, the losers will make sure that it comes back. Polarities are inherently different. They don't respond to these kind of technical solutions. And they don't respond to win-lose advocacy. What they do respond to is that slow, trusting, face-to-face communication. So Carcassani says that when we recognize that we're the wicked problem, it's not the problem. It's the problem that's wicked and not the people. And that's the trick. Some of you have probably seen the best-selling book, The Sum of Us, by Heather McGee. And she tells the story of desegregation in the American South in the 50s and 60s. Where some towns were, they were being desegregated because the federal government told them they had to. They were so against allowing black people to swim in the pools that rather than desegregate those pools, they literally drained them so that nobody could swim. So rather than this crazy, drained pool politics, those zero-sum policies were both sides lose. Heather McGee's book is filled with lots of modern examples of sort of deeper, cross-cultural understanding. And it creates, this is a great term that she used, the solidarity dividend where all sides can benefit if we can just come together. There's a dividend. We don't have to drain the pool. And it's great news, our brains actually do. We can actually be smart. We can actually use our full intellectual capacity better when we don't trigger the us and them and fight and fight, feel it. So what are some of those techniques that we can engage people with in less divisive ways and honor our differences? That's what we're gonna be talking about tonight. I'm just gonna give you a little slice though of Vermont history because just in case you think that this is something that is new to us. A little us then divide. I'll be curious whether this is a divide that you feel like has any resonance here in Bethel. I know it does in my town. There's a professor named Paul Searles. He is a historian at Northern Vermont University. And he wrote this book called Two Vermonts. So what does he mean by two Vermonts? This is a split that emerged as the industrial era progressed. So 1865 to 1910, a while ago, between two Vermont populations. And he gave them the names, the up-hillers and the down-hillers. Although this isn't really about geography. It's not even about economics. It's not even about education. It's really about values. So up-hillers. You might think like Hill Farm, up-hillers. These are the folks who value local cooperative relationships. They are self-reliant, egalitarians. These are cooperate informally, kind of do things by handshake. Typical of pre-industrial rural America. Also typical of many traditional cultures. So those are the up-hillers. The down-hillers, you might think village, the valley mill owners. These are folks who value efficiency, right? Competition, markets, formal contractual relationships. They were much more comfortable with the concentration of power in larger institutions. So here's like an oversimplified example. If your neighbor's dog is barking, who do you call? If you call your neighbor, that's an up-hill tendency. If you call the animal control officer, that's more of a down-hill tendency. So can you kind of picture what I'm talking about here? Knotted heads, yeah. So these values and their elements of identity, they continue today and many of us, I would say probably most of us have a mix of up-hill and down-hill running through us and importantly so do our communities. And you know what, neither of these is right or wrong. And in fact, communities really benefit when we have both. It's just they have to figure out how to coexist and respect each other. So even if you've never heard of polarities or rocket problems or any of that kind of stuff, you can see that our region has this heritage of grappling with these things. But just so you know, this isn't unique to Vermont or our region, there's residents here, David Goodhart, he's from England. And he talks about two groups that he calls the somewheres and the anywheres. And there's some similarities here. The somewheres are people who understand the world through long-term, placed-based relationships. So like farming and mining, you know, local industry. So they live somewhere. And the anywheres are the cosmopolitan elite. Rather than that sort of place-based identity, they have what's called an achieved identity. So it's based on their education, it's based on their career success. They're very comfortable with change and they can live anywhere. So the trait that these kind of anywhere people and the down-hillers share is that they like to change things. And they tend to think, doesn't everybody like to change things? They kind of assume that a somewhere is just somebody who hasn't become in anywhere yet, right? But these are not lately held preferences. These are really, these are identities and worldviews. And as Goodhart puts it, the somewheres aren't going anywhere. And so if we oversimplify and write off somewheres, especially in more rural areas, as nostalgic or backward, we do it at our peril. Goodhart makes the case that the growing sense of understanding and respect or the growing lack of understanding and respect between these two worldviews, they help explain Brexit and also the extremist political factions in the United States. So many New England communities are in the process of expanding and evolving our collective identity and that's awesome. But to do so successfully, we're gonna need to recognize and respect the culture and the traditions that have helped make our community strong so far. So let's talk about a few of those right now. We're gonna talk about town meeting, right? So I'm here to talk about town meeting. We're switching gears. Town meeting, probably most of you know this only exists in New England and Switzerland. By the way, anybody wanna talk about Switzerland? See me afterwards, because that was a really fun trip to Switzerland. I took the study town meeting years ago. But when America went west, town meeting did not go with, partly because of that spread out sort of planes, geography really didn't lend itself to the kind of participatory governance we do here in our hills and valleys. It's also because the founders, there were a bunch of founders who really did not like the idea of that much democracy. Like that town meetings were way too much democracy because we are weirdly empowered at town meetings. At a traditional town meeting, on issues of finance and governance, every registered voter is a legislator. You're making binding decisions about spending and you're making amendments and otherwise taking direct action in government. So it's direct deliberative democracy. Government is a week. You don't see a lot of they should do this. We are the government at town meeting. It's really different from, especially folks from outside of New England who come here think that they're talking about town hall meetings, town halls, where politicians give speeches or voters advise their elected officials. That's not what a town meeting is here. Our power is limited to local issues, our local budget, roads, certain amount of discretionary funding for nonprofits, but the power is real and the decisions are binding. So as our town's legislative branch, we serve on legislative committees between sessions. That's the planning commission. That's the conservation committee, things like that. And again, while this kind of power is really unusual elsewhere, it's the norm in New England. In Vermont, just so you know, over three quarters of Vermont towns make decisions of some kind at floor meetings, like that one does. And well over two thirds of Vermont towns use a floor meeting to determine their budgets as you do here. Because they're so common here in Vermont, we Vermont are sometimes taken for granted. But I'll tell you, one of Governor Jim Douglas' favorite things to do with other secretaries of state from other towns was to take them to town meetings and watch their hair light on fire because they just could not believe how much trust we have here in Vermont in governing ourselves. So how's town meeting fairing today? The recognized expert on that is Frank Bryan, UVM political science professor emeritus. And Frank spent 30 years sending students out to literally thousands of town meetings across the state. And they counted attendance at four times during the meeting. How many men? How many women? Who spoke? How many times? How long? What was the weather? Was there a meal? Was there childcare? Really amazingly rich data that he collected in his book, Real Democracy. And a bunch of his findings actually completely surprised political science. They had no idea that the kinds of findings that he found. I'll give you some, a few basics. Attendance, no real surprise here. As you probably know, town meetings are struggling. In 2005, the 30 year average attendance was 20.5, but attendance has been declining. And Bryan's most recent average was down to 11%. Higher and smaller towns, lower and bigger towns, which we'll talk about in a sec. And so attendance is absolutely crucial. We need to consider ways to improve it. But that said, I would urge us to keep that number in perspective. You might think 11% of voters deciding for 100% of the town, this is terrible. But comparing town meeting attendance to 100% of the checklist is not realistic because you have to remember these are really local issues. And the sad fact is that across the United States on local issues, turn out for ballot box voting, not even asking somebody to sit in one of these uncomfortable chairs that you're sitting in for four hours, but just ballot box voting on local issues is really higher than 25%. And it can struggle to get out of the single digits. And just last week in the town of Berlin, they had a bond vote on five items, totaling $11 million in long term debt. This was a ballot vote, you could get a mailed ballot. And of their 2,183 voters, 317 cast a ballot. It's really common, it's really common on these local things. So back to attendance at town meeting, why? Frank Bryan identified three top factors that affect attendance at town meeting. And the first one is town size. Small towns get way better for capita attendance than larger towns. I think there's something really that we can hold on to here. Like when we know each other, when there is a sense of scale, when we have a sense of responsibility with each other, we are more likely to engage. And this was one of Frank's findings 30 years ago and it still holds up today. In 2019, towns of under 2,500 population got more than twice the per capita attendance of larger towns. A second key factor is issues. And this is one we can absolutely act on. We can absolutely, after town size, the single strongest predictor of attendance is whether there are hot issues on the morning. Now this is one that really surprised political scientists. They thought they had long believed that Americans hate controversy. And if you ask them to do something controversial, they will not attend. And in fact, Frank Bryan's research proved that controversy actually draws attendance to town meeting. What's the difference? Power. The difference is power. Voters don't wanna go to a town hall meeting where they yell at each other and feel really impotent and have no power. But if they know they can make a difference, if they know that their participation could change things, they're willing to step up. So town meeting might be sleepy for a few years and then suddenly, if you're looking at the numbers, you see the spike in attendance. It goes from like 15% to 65. What's going on? They're citing windmills. There's always something, right? Something big. And this is a reminder that town meeting is the structure that waits for us. And if we invest in it, it's there when we need it. And a third critical, basically threat to town meeting is Australian ballot, especially if it's used to decide the budget. So in recent years, more towns have switched from the traditional for meeting to Australian ballot. They have this informational meeting a few days before, within 10 days before. And some folks think that because it kind of, an information meeting kind of looks like a town meeting because the chairs are set up in the same way. And so they think that the informational meeting is the town meeting, but it's actually not. It's a public hearing. Voters can speak and listen, but no decisions are made there. The decisions are made by ballot. The thing is, voters, they may not know the difference, but they sense the difference. And if you had like a heat sensor and you could show where the power was in that room, it's like, so their colors would be flipped and all the powers up there in the select board. Whereas at a town meeting, the power is in the room. And again, voters know the difference. Australian ballot does result often in more voting, but with less robust turnout and discussion at the informational hearing. And sometimes indeed at those informational hearings, it's just the select board or the school board sitting there by themselves. But the most important thing might be the invisible effect that these meetings have over time because they change the nature of local democracy. Rather than that direct deliberative democracy, they're much closer to what political scientists call conventional participation. And to be clear, the majority of formal participation in the United States is defined as conventional participation. So that means public hearings. It means most of the public hearings held by school boards, city councils, state and federal agencies, legislature, where everybody gets two minutes at the microphone. And at public hearings, participants, they don't have power to decide, they'll power to amend. And social scientists have been collecting data on conventional participation since public hearings were enshrined in the law in the 1950s. And here are some quotes, this is a recent textbook about public participation. Conventional participation can be harmful to citizens. It tends to increase our feelings of powerlessness. It decreases political interests. It decreases our trust in government. And it damages the perceptions of governmental legitimacy and credibility. And it also can increase polarization. It sort of shifts us toward more extreme positions. So this is really bad. But I think it's worse because conventional participation is also really not good for the folks that the poor people who are running these public hearings that administrators and public officials, it's frustrating, it's discouraging, it's sometimes even dangerous to deal with a hostile, uninformed citizens at a public hearing. And ultimately, it can affect the policy and the governance because the relationship deteriorates between the people and the public institutions. So the legitimacy and the financial sustainability of the governments can decline. So the structure of the meetings where the power resides, it can have really lasting consequences on democracy. Let's talk about inclusion. One of the foundations of our democratic system. I'm sure that you are aware that we've heard a lot about this. Ballot box voting in the United States, it is notoriously skewed to our great shame. Factors like race and income and education level absolutely help predict American's likelihood to vote. So how about town meeting? What's its record for inclusion? Well, again, Vermont is among the white estates in the United States, so it goes without saying that our town meetings are also overwhelmingly white, but Vermont is quite socioeconomically diverse. And town meeting observations, it can shine some light on groups that are typically underrepresented in our democracy. And what they've found in particular, Frank Brand's research has found is super interesting. Because Professor Brand assumed that town meetings, he assumed they'd behave like the rest of our political structures. They would exclude certain classes of people, but try as he might, given 30 years of data, he could find no link between any of a town's socioeconomic indicators like people's occupation or their income or their levels of education and the town's attendance at town meeting or their verbal participation. And likewise, he found no link between whether a town is socioeconomically diverse and whether people attend. And in fact, diversity increases the amount of people speaking at town meeting, which is a really good thing. So it's fascinating. This data suggests that town meetings are actually more welcoming than America's ballot system, which is something, you know, we can be proud of that, but we can learn from it because there are elements of face-to-face democracy that invite often marginalized populations. And if you think about it, deliberation is always the preferred choice of the underdog, right? In elections, which candidate wants the debate? It's always the challenger, right? The incumbent is always like, yeah, I'll get back to you. Yeah, we'll find a date sometime to have a debate. And the challenger is like, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I'll be there any time, right? It's because opening up issues to discussion, it's risky to the status quo. It's what allows in the air and the light and the change. So town meeting allows different ways of knowing, different ways of incorporating lots of different backgrounds and wisdom. You know, there's people up there getting speeches with microphones and throwing around data and stuff, but there's people just telling their stories and it's a place where we humanize. And I think all of us who've been to a town meeting has seen this happen at least once, where a town meeting is a place where a story from a neighbor can shed a whole new light and it often carry the day. One last little data point to throw at you about inclusivity, which is women's participation. You have to keep in mind, town meetings, the legislature. We're creating and setting the tax rate. We're amending and passing budgets. Well, guess what? The policies made in Washington, DC, or our state capital of Montpelier, even those crafted by city councils and select boards, they're almost always crafted disproportionately by men. In 2023, the United States celebrated the highest percentage of women in Congress in U.S. history. 29%, yes. Which, by the way, represents a 59% increase from just a decade ago. Last time I looked, there were more than 29% of the people in America were women, but. At many, in Vermont's town meetings, women regularly make up 50% of the attendees. They're often in the majority. A majority of the legislators are females. This is an extraordinary statement to be able to make in the United States. So I think of all the things that democracy needs right now, I would argue one of the most important ones is being able to sit down and listen to each other and see each other and understand that we're all in this together. We may not like each other, but we have to respect each other. And I'll just end with a quote from Jane Mansbridge. She's a leading democracy scholar at Harvard. She said, at a time when trust in government is declining in most of the world's democracies, interest is growing dramatically in the ways that citizens can govern themselves and Vermont town meetings stand as a beacon before the world. Sure. Absolutely, happy to take questions. Yes, we have time. Thoughts, questions, observations, worst town meeting you ever went to, story. Actually have a website, a slow democracy website, and I don't have the town meeting website, but I would be happy to share those resources. Yeah, and actually I have a couple others in later on that I'll be using, so I'll be sure to give those to, yeah. Thoughts or questions, no? I think people just are basically stunned. Thank you so much, Susan. My name is Rebecca Stone. I'm a member of the town meeting and community engagement committee. I have to get it right. So really excited to have Susan here and I've had the honor of working with Susan over the last year and taking this conversation to different communities. We wanna let everybody here have the chance for some great conversation around this tonight on Susan's last point about how important it is that we have these discussions face to face and talk to each other. We wanna use tonight as an opportunity to start that and have some conversations that we haven't had enough of in our community and in our schools. So we are gonna have a couple rounds of conversation if we can still fit it in. We're about 10 minutes behind, but we'll do our best. We will ask everybody maybe to clear plates if you still have stuff and then find yourself at a table with about six people. That's probably a good number so that you can all hear each other and have a small conversation. Bonus points, if you find yourself at a table with people you don't know or maybe who are in a bit of a different role or bring a different perspective than you. So just take about two minutes to do that and then we'll give you instructions for the first conversation. Can we start passing them out? I'm on the wrong slide. No, thank you. Okay, so you've all noticed you're getting some paper and some markers on your table, which is great. I'm going to go ahead and just give you a quick introduction and I know we have a few more people coming in. Susan's given us so much to think about when it comes to town meeting and voting and how to grow our civic experience as a community. We wanted to introduce you to another idea as we start this first conversation. Susan made the great point that this is not a case where we just hope to have a strong local democracy and strong community and it happens. It takes practice, it takes exercise and it's also about a lot more than just town meeting and year round engagement. In fact, there are a lot of different civic strengths or civic infrastructure that we can intentionally build and grow in our community so that we do have the strong system there to make the decisions we need and engage people in the ways they wanna engage. One of the first steps we can do as a community is start talking about what's strong already? What are these strengths that are important to us? What do we value about participation and engagement here in Bethel? How are we doing on that right now? And then where might we wanna focus some efforts? When Susan was here back in 2014, she gave us so many great ideas and town meeting committee set out and did some of them, equity and inclusion committee has come along and done some, the schools are doing some many groups but we haven't been that intentional about what really needs the most work and where we could really stand to grow as a community in school. Quick concept for you, a group called the National Civic League has studied this a lot, lots of people have studied this a lot as Susan showed and they have something called the Civic Index which really identifies based on research what all these different strengths and capacities are that communities need to have strong civic engagement. I'm not gonna run you through all of them, it's a really interesting tool really long but these are some big buckets that have been identified that are really important. So we can talk tonight about town meeting, about voting, about ways to make those more accessible, how to get more people to school meeting but we can also talk about a lot of different things where we're strong already and where we wanna grow stronger and just a quick snapshot of what a few of these are. So community involvement in general, how many volunteers do we have turning out for things? Do we have a culture of getting involved and participating and wanna be part of decision making? Do we offer year round opportunities and flexible engagement? How's our collaboration and leadership? Do we have diverse and trusted leaders who represent and reflect the full community? Do we have opportunities to grow leadership, either skills or new leaders and people coming in? Do our groups collaborate and work well together or do they operate in silos? Accessibility and inclusion is huge and the equity and inclusion committee, schools, anti-racism task force have done such great work bringing us along. So how are we doing in terms of making our participation opportunities accessible to everyone no matter what their race, their gender, their age, their political beliefs, abilities or disabilities? Is it possible or are there barriers? Are we working to remove those barriers and make it easier to participate? Do people feel welcome and included? Culture and connections, do we have a strong sense of community and identity? Do people feel connected to each other into our place? Do we celebrate history and traditions and the people who are here and the new ideas coming in? I've got a duplicate up here. The one in the middle is supposed to be information and communications. Do people have access to balanced informed information about the issues and the decisions in front of them? Is it easy to understand what we're discussing, what we're debating, what we're voting on? Is it easy to understand how to come to these meetings, how to participate, how Robert's rules works? Do we have strong community channels for people to share information with each other? And then, deliberation, trust and respect. Do we have opportunities for people to get together and talk about important issues face to face despite any differences, despite political differences, despite different backgrounds or interests? Can people engage respectfully and have balanced conversations? Are we creating those opportunities and making sure that people have the skills and the experience to engage in them in a way that feels comfortable and welcome? So that's just a snapshot of the whole universe of things that we could be talking about. We're gonna have one conversation first for about 15 minutes. And that's really focused on what you all think about our engagement and community connections today. What do you love about participation, about culture, about local democracy in our school and our community right now? What are your favorite ways to participate of what feels comfortable? And what do you think is most needed? Where do we most need to grow in community and school in some of these ways? So we will ask you all to do a couple things at your table, go around in a circle ideally. So introduce yourself, where are you from? Maybe a couple of hats you wear in the community. Then share one each, something you really love or value about community engagement and participation in school or in community or both. And something you think needs work or somewhere we can really improve. And after everybody's gone around, hopefully you'll have a few minutes as a group to just discuss and see what's bubbling up for all of you. Each person, this is really important, can take about two minutes, okay? So really try to limit yourself if you're one of those people who will go on and on and we'll ask the rest of your table mates to gently help nudge you along. You can just do a kind gesture of wrapping it up and trust that you all have each other's best interests at heart, okay? So that will be our first conversation. And then we're gonna come back and hear some ideas, some exciting ideas for what we could actually do on some of these key themes. What projects people wanna move forward? What we most wanna advance? And we'll wrap up tonight thinking about what next? What do we do after this next round of conversation? Oh, thank you. Yes, you do. The paper on your tables is how you take notes and capture the ideas that you're talking about and sharing. So we invite everybody to scribble and take notes and write your ideas. Try to make sure that what you say is captured on there somewhere so that we have a record of it. But you can also doodle and have as much fun as you want just using the paper, okay? So we have about 15 minutes and then we'll come back for a few ideas and then talk again. Okay, if we could get everybody to listen for a couple more minutes, just pause your conversation, you'll get to pick it up very soon. We would love to just hear the kinds of things that are bubbling up for all of you. In the interest of time, we're gonna adjust on the fly tonight. We were gonna do some live polling on phones, in part because it's fun and to gather information and in part because this is an example of a kind of tool we could bring into our local engagement. However, given time, we're gonna skip that and do it the old fashioned way and just have you all share some of the things bubbling up and we'll do a quick poll by vote of hands. And then we'll hear from Susan on some ideas and solutions. So I'm curious, we'll just go table by table for a minute. What kinds of things were popping up that you all really love about local engagement and our community and schools around here? And we'll just go around. How about Nicole's table over here? What was popping up for you? People move in and out of positions. Oh, thank you. And the meetings are good. We have people coming together and eating together and getting aligned. And there's been some rapid improvements with community engagement over the past decade. So those were some good things. And actually, table to do share a couple words about it. So we have time to come back. I'm gonna go with what you had, Dick. Okay, that said, among the things we like, I listed the mutual respect, which is not evident in every town. But I think you've always seen that in Bethel. And for expansion improvement, we can expand on that. And the other thing is, and no one heard this, I just took the liberty. Better attendance at the library's legislative gatherings. Yeah. Yeah. Keep on coming, write it all down. So we had a good combination of new arrivals and people have been here a really long time. We talked about the Operator's Manual, the Equity Inclusion Committee, Bethel University, all being big attractors for people who wanna be here. That there's a problem feeling isolated in the outer villages. There's some hurdles and challenges to getting involved, more knowledge about what's available. And town meeting, they know we're allowed to take the day off, but who's gonna get the work done when I'm not there? So. Oh, and we'd like to figure out how to create more support for teachers in the schools. Get it together. Okay, we're lucky enough to have a newcomer and three very young people, high school students, at our table, which was extremely helpful. And because, and that's part of the discussion was, and Chris pointed out is a very good observation that when the merger of the schools occurred, and when the merger of the schools occurred, there was a lot of fewer, most of it from the adults. These kids love it. These kids have broadened their community. And now I think they're going to be much more willing to do what we're, what us old folks are doing now. So that was one of the high points. And a newcomer who says it's a very welcoming community. Hi, we also talked a lot about participation and volunteering and feeling connected and just connecting with community. And then a lot of what could be improved was around town meeting and making it accessible and how we get people involved. Also talks, one thing that we like about that specifically or the way our process works in Bethel is how accessible our town leadership actually is. I'm not saying that people take advantage of that, but you can, one could walk into the town office and have a schedule meeting with our town manager. We are invited to be at all select board meetings. But the gap is between that and actually letting people know that that is available to them. So that's kind of the big question of how does that information get spread and how do we keep people involved because of a variety of barriers that they may have to going to things during the day, like town meeting. Yeah, that's basically, that's just the big question. How to let people know what their opportunities are here. Hi, we talked at this table about what's taught in school as far as local government once said, have we stalled as far as being participatory in town meeting, how can we make town government more accessible and it is pretty accessible. We also talked about that select board meetings, people can watch them on Zoom, people can attend, the agenda is printed every other week online. Yep, and then you can watch it again on Orca media. And a lot of, and some of it was community involvement and trying to get the students to probably participate more by going to select board meetings and in local government and going to town meetings. So they're our future generation. So the more they can participate, the better we all are. All right, thanks everybody. Rather than going around again, let's just have anybody call out loudly, any of the needs you talked about that weren't already mentioned. A lot of groups kind of went in that direction anyway. A youth center. Okay. Transportation. Where was Karen? Oh, over there. Okay, yeah. Transportation in general? Any? In general. Civics classes, civics education. I will throw on for adults because I think there are a lot of adults who need that as well. Anybody else? Other things that weren't mentioned. Okay. I'll add to that. Yeah. Mixed together. Multi-generational, yep. Great. So if you couldn't hear, there's been discussion about civics education in schools to teach students how to participate, but this table talked about the opposite. Should community leaders be going into schools to connect directly with students with teachers community there? And you're talking about everybody, not youth specifically. Yeah. Okay. So more consistent involvement year round. People come out for a town meeting. They come out when there's something big to eat. Then they go home and watch Netflix. How do we get them out all the time in a more consistent way? Anybody else? Needs. Yeah. More joy and fun. Lyle and I had an idea earlier that we'll have to share with you before the night is up. Jean, is that a hand? Okay. My hand. I'll welcome feedback. Yeah. So lots of themes in there from Jean by all means. And trends I certainly see all over the country as I work with communities. There is a culture shift happening and people do wanna engage in different ways than they did three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. So something we can keep in mind and should keep in mind. Lots of other positives that we've heard in Bethels through other planning processes and conversations. This is not the first one of this kind and so many that are worth looking at. I wanna call out the community school program. Mary Shell is the director coordinator, community school coordinator. Which is brand new. It's a grant funded program in our community to help build community school connections and to get more people engaged and to address some of the needs that we see in the community. And that's the real strength. I see that information and communications conversation happening all the time. How do we make sure people know about what's going on and have the information they need? And we've got different pockets of the community doing really good innovations in that in different ways, some community volunteer groups who are doing a great job putting out the word about what they're doing. As a parent of kids in the school, I love that the announcements come out via text message and email and another way of phone calls. So that people use different communication channels, they're still gonna get it. So lots of options. Quick poll on show of hands before we hear one more time from Susan and then talk ideas. I'm gonna just zoom back to a slide over here for a second. Going back to these key civic strengths, I will actually update this one that's info. I'm gonna ask you to think about these six categories that are up here and we'll just do a very fast poll on where you all think we should be focusing or investing, where are the areas where we need the most growth as school and community here? So we'll give you two votes each. So make your decisions and then I'll just go category by category and we'll see where the energy seems to be. I will read them again. So community involvement, that green is a little hard to see, collaboration and leadership, accessibility and inclusion, culture and connections, information and communications and then deliberation, trust and respect. Okay, so get you two in mind. How many of you think community involvement is an area where we should focus? Culture of involvement, getting people to participate, offering those year round opportunities to participate. Okay, about 10 to 12. Collaboration and leadership, having diverse leaders who represent our community who are trusted, creating pipelines and opportunities for people to get involved in leadership. Collaboration across groups. Hands up if you like this one. Okay, few less maybe. Accessibility and inclusion, making sure that we remove barriers to participation that people can participate no matter what race, culture, background, beliefs, a lot of hands on that one, okay. You get two votes. That doesn't mean we can't do more things. We're just getting a pulse check. Culture and connections, building a strong sense of community, making sure people feel connected to it, feel welcome, feel connected to each other, okay. Half a hand care. Information and communications, making sure people can find out what's going on, how to participate, what the issues are, hi, bunch of hands there. And last, deliberation, trust and respect. We can engage with each other respectfully. We have opportunities to have conversations face to face. Okay. So, a lot of work close. Accessibility and inclusion, I think was the clear winner there. That was the one I saw the most hands for. All right, I'm gonna pass it to Susan for maybe about 10 minutes of things we can do. And then we'll finish with one more table conversations tonight. Pictures there, yeah. All right, some quick, quick tips. And these are thinking about town meeting but thinking about participation throughout the year as well. Cause a lot of them are absolutely related to other ways that we get together. And the first one, and this one is absolutely data supported from all of that stuff that I was telling you about trying to find it. Guess what? We got off of childcare. Otherwise you're bringing your kid to meetings. Which actually bringing your kid to meetings is not a terrible thing if they are incredibly well-becaved like this 10-month old over here, unbelievable. Or if they are old enough to maybe pay attention. But I did a bunch of interviews with high participation town meeting towns. And so many people mentioned that one of the ways that they first, one of the first things they remember about town meeting was going when they were a kid. And they had no idea what was going on but they thought it was sort of fun to watch the grownups sass each other. So either offer childcare or offer a way for kids to be involved. And I'll go along with the childcare. Absolutely offering a meal is, as we did tonight, this is really important, especially for young families, people to be able to really fit things into their day. It's another way to get people to participate. And I think that we can also think about stipends if we need to. Or at least the possibility of one if you have travel needs or transportation needs or childcare needs making up a pot of funds available. Different communities have different cultures on this. So you have to consider privacy. You have to consider dignity. But in this economy, it's a key consideration. Another really important one that, oops, that's not the one I wanted to show you. That one I wanted to show you. This one is one that especially for town and school leaders. We think that we make an agenda and it's going to be self-explanatory. But as I mentioned, besides town size, the single most important factor in determining town meetings attendance is what's on the warning and making sure people really understand what's going on. There's always something interesting on a town meeting morning. But a lot of times leaders kind of obscure it. It's hidden in the budget. Maybe they don't mean to. Maybe they do. But whether you're paying the sheriff less to address speeding or you decreased the road salt or maybe you're adopting a new policy on alternative energy, people care. And so this is the kind of thing that the engagement committee could do. Really publicize through whatever means possible from porch forum. Here's what's interesting in the budget this year. And if leaders really want to be brave, they can actually single out parts of the budget and make them their own separate article. And this is a brave thing to do because of course it puts that article at risk. And it also can be really rewarding because then people really kind of chew on it and the buy-in, if it passes, is much stronger. Timing was mentioned. Town meetings are the first by law, the first Tuesday in March or any of the three days preceding. This is a town by town decision and you have to look at your own demographics and figure out, but this is definitely something you can experiment with. You can try a Saturday meeting, you can try an evening meeting and see how it goes. Do a nose count, do a survey afterwards. See if people, it's partly, do you have a lot of commuters? Do you have people, how far are they traveling? How discretionary are their schedules? These are important questions. Night meetings tend to be harder for older folks. You have to factor in school break, absolutely, in terms of families might be gone that Saturday before. As far as the 30 years of research, some towns saw an improvement when they changed the timing of their town meeting. Other towns saw a decrease, like people were trying playing with Saturday meetings and they saw a decrease in attendance and on average, there was no change. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try because you might be one of those towns that gets the increase. So it's just something to know about is that generally speaking, when people say it's a time issue, we have to wonder whether it is a time issue, but absolutely give it a try. Another one, I always, I tell people about the Bethel Operators Manual everywhere I go, it's such a great example. So just so you know, you are a statewide model. But there are other ways too to explain the process, especially because you guys all switch, you all, your town switched to adopting, Australian Ballot for Electing Officers. People are gonna need to understand how this works. How do you run for office? How do I know who to vote for? So something like a candidate's web page where candidates, maybe even a candidate's forum, especially if there are any contested issues are helpful. It's really, really great that you have this, it's really, really great that you have a standing committee to do this work. This is something that's super powerful and I would just really encourage anyone who's interested in what your engagement committee is doing to join or at least bring them cookies. The towns that do this kind of thing, Hortsmouth, New Hampshire is one that really comes to mind. They can be really a legacy community. Rather than trying to promote a specific outcome, these are groups that support diverse participation and excellent democratic process in multiple ways. You know, town meeting was never intended to be the only time that we get together. It was never, it can't bear that burden. It's too much to ask of that one infrastructure. It's the decision moment of a year's worth of democracy. So we need all kinds of structures to communicate and opportunities year-round to participate. The town of East Montpelier does a welcome new voter letter and they just go to the town clerk and say, who are the newest people this year? Who's been at it since last year? And they send out a letter. Here's how town meeting works, here's how democracy works. It's especially important to welcome immigrants and refugees and new Americans who may not understand the process. Every town should know whether you might have translation issues in Burlington, where they have students coming from households of 40 different languages. They have an annual event where they break up in tables by language to just walk through the issues on the ballot and translate them. And again, I just can't emphasize enough involving youth. You can have middle schoolers run the microphones around during town meeting. We do that in our town. We thank them with an ice cream cone gift certificate, but we know that they're in it for the glory, actually. So it's a great, it's really, really valuable. You guys, you all probably have to stop saying you guys. It's like so old. Peachum, you probably saw, has a really elaborate partnership between their school and their town, where every grade it goes through a democratic process to nominate a name for their town's snow plow. And then the voters, the way they do it is that each grade goes through this whole democratic process and then the voters at town meeting get to vote on it, you know, Sparkles, Darth Vader for the sixth graders, you know. And so you get the kids lobbying the parents. It's a very fun, inspiring, unforgettable for the kids, I think, and a light-hearted moment at town meeting for the adults, and of course, always in the news. You might have seen the Woodbury town meeting. Elementary school did, teamed up, the town lottery reader teamed up with the elementary school to do a mock town meeting, but it wasn't really a mock town meeting. They had 500 bucks. And they debated a couple of issues, but one of them was, how were they gonna spend those $500 on a new playground equipment or a field trip? And so you had these kids discussing, you see what age they are, you know, discussing a long-term investment versus experiential learning. It was quite, quite, from what public did it, wonderful story on this. So Google that and listen to their statements. And I'll just, you know, spoiler alert, they chose the field trip, but what's great about it is that the Fairbanks Museum heard that they had chosen the field trip and then donated the field trip. Yeah, so then they got the playground equipment, right? I'm not sure what the lesson is actually there, but okay. I would, definitely celebrating that sense of place in history, before anybody's ever gonna wanna go to a community meeting, they need to love, they need to love the community. And so if we really do want to create, you know, sustainable change, we have to lead with and celebrate what we share and place, our sense of place. It's literally our commons. When you think about a commons, that's what it is. It's the thing we have in common. So, you know, your conservation committee might organize a trail building where the families get to come or in middle sex, we have something called the middle sex makers. We knew that there were some people who were not gonna come to a middle sex visioning process that we did. We just knew that there were some people who didn't like meetings. So we had a partner event called middle sex makers. And this was just for people who like to work with their hands and it was everybody from the landscapers, the driveway builders, the foresters and loggers, to the knitters and the poets and novelists. And it was a beautiful community festival of making. A very different way to see each other, a very different way to engage with each other. But super powerful in building that sense of connection. Because again, you have to remember, conflict entrepreneurs are gonna make it their business to take these big overarching national issues and rile up the base. And so the more we can actually focus on the very local meaning that we have together, the more productive we are going to be together. So it's not us versus them, it's just us. I think we do, all those in favor, has a civic invocation at the beginning of it. It was created by the town of Danville. And it is a beautiful statement that we always have a new voter, which usually means somebody who just turned 18 read at the beginning, a welcome statement at the beginning of our town meeting. And I would really recommend having that kind of statement at the beginning. It reminds us where we are and why we're there. I've got a few outside of the box ideas, if we have time. Okay. Talk to me afterwards, because some of these are subversive, okay. I've got actually a list of several illegal ideas. But you know what? The laws can be changed. So one of them, of course, yes, we can absolutely film our meetings. We can actually zoom our meetings. At town meeting, we can't vote remotely. And this is because as I mentioned, there's a lot of concern in particular nationally about a voter fraud. And so how do I make sure that that person on Zoom really is the person that they say they are? So, and I will tell you that my town of Middlesex did this for 10 years, okay. So, and then along came COVID, along came that rise in questions about voter fraud and the Secretary of State told us to cut it out. But I would argue that this is something that we are definitely gonna have to deal with. The legislature is gonna have to deal with in the future because people absolutely expect to be able to participate if nothing else for ADA reasons. We're probably gonna, town meeting, the traditional town, you know, wind up with a lawsuit if we don't deal with this lawsuit. So, but you can participate from home. You can, sorry, you can watch and you can have your town meeting streamed. You can have people watch and listen by Zoom no matter what, so absolutely go ahead and do that. This is probably, I don't know if you can read this, but here up at the bottom of this is how to write a charter for your town, how to create a charter by your town, created by the Vermont Institute for Government. And Paul Gillis, the attorney who created it, wrote at the bottom, this is a subversive document. It contains instructions on how to change your government in the long hands, it can be a dangerous weapon. But use properly, it can create many years of productive life in your town government. So, if you wanted to, if you wanted to make a change to your town government, you could do it through creating a governance charter. And there's a whole bunch of crazy stuff you could do once you had a charter, assuming that the legislature reviewed it and allowed it. One of those, for example, is to allow non-citizen voting on the local issues. And some of you probably heard that Montpelier and Winoski and Burlington all have done that and they did it through a charter process. It was challenged. It was vetoed by the governor. It was overridden by the legislature. And it went to the Supreme Court. But, you know, like I said, it's not easy. You can do it. Couple others, keypad voting, also illegal, but you could try it. If you had a governance charter, you could do it. I'll tell you, there's a bunch of models, other models in New Hampshire, models for participatory budgeting, even a citizen's assembly, which is used across the world. These are, people are drawn by jury to come, a jury lot to come to the town meeting. So these are all creative things that you could do if you don't want the structure that you have right now be creative. That's the main thing that I would say there. Oh, and there's an idea book, right? Okay, so there are so many more ideas in the idea book that you're gonna, I just wanna pitch this. There's some great stuff in there. Thank you so much, Susan. So, we are down to officially 10 minutes left tonight, which is unfortunate, because we could talk about this so much longer, I think, but we wanna take those 10 minutes, basically, to let you talk about what ideas we should really look into moving forward here. I'm gonna hope the committee does not mind that I do this and just do a couple of wrap up remarks really quickly. We are meeting again in December. I don't have the date in mind. December 12th. We typically meet around four o'clock in the afternoon, but we could potentially shift that if there are people interested in coming or getting involved in continuing the conversation. So, that meeting, especially, will be one where we're really interested in thinking ahead to March town meeting. Maybe school meeting is something we can help with. Bring Pi there as well. Thinking about ballot voting for officers and how we can address some of those information needs. How do we look ahead and help people figure out how to get on the ballot, what that means, how voting might be different this year? How do we make it really fun? How can we bring some of these creative ideas in so that it's not just a meeting that people don't wanna go to? How can we make it more accessible and inclusive? Where do you meet? Where do you meet? We've got a meeting at the downtown office. And you're talking to the community. We can do that, yeah. We'll do a sign up on the way out so if you're interested in participating in that or something else, you can leave your name and we'll get in touch and figure out the best plan. You don't have to remember it right now. But lots of questions we could tackle immediately and a lot of really low hanging fruit. Small things that we could do to make this year's meeting and this year's voting process more inclusive, more accessible or to try things and see how it works. So to Gene's point, you may not wanna join a committee or come to a lot more meetings like this, but if you'd like to work on something small and try to make a change in the next three months, put a name down and we can get in touch with you. And even if you don't wanna come to next month's meeting, we can give in touch and see what you might wanna work on. We could bring in some really fun ideas. I told you I'd share the wild one that Lyle and I had earlier before this event. I was watching the last 10 minutes of my daughter's cheer practice. The Bethel Wildcat cheerleaders are pretty fierce this year so you're gonna wanna check that out. And we thought, what if we could have them come and cheer for all the voters and cheer at town meeting and have a little halftime show, something like that. Which may be a terrible idea, but you get the point. We can think outside of the box here and think of some pretty exciting ideas. So the idea book Susan mentioned, there are a lot of ideas other places have done or thought about or tried way beyond town meeting, way beyond voting itself all year round, ways that do not evolve sitting at meetings. And that's what we wanna spend the last like 10 minutes thinking on if you wanna stay five minutes past eight o'clock, if you have to go, please go when you need to. Jean? An announcement. With it? Okay. So we've got a lot of information just like that to get out to the more than 50 people who are here tonight. And encourage everybody to do that, get on the ballot if you want to, but also come and help think about how we can get this out to more people. Other organizations, the Equity and Inclusion Committee is doing awesome work. Join their meetings and go check out what they're doing and come to the book club. And this school is doing awesome work, creating community connections for students and getting them out and have really important stuff. They're discussing at school board meetings if you are the kind of person who likes meetings. Here are other invitations or Mary that you wanna throw out specifically? I'm hitting the big ones. Okay. Awesome. Kim, quickly? Yep. Awesome. I think there are probably 30 opportunities like that in the room tonight and we won't take the time to hear them all, but there's a big question. How do we get those out to the community and get more people showing up? So on your way out the door tonight, if you want to stay involved in any way, if you hear any idea or talk about one in the next 10 minutes that is exciting to you, put your name on a piece of paper and tell us what thing interests you and how we can follow up with you after tonight. Okay. So I'm gonna distribute these just to sprinkling on tables so that you can get a sense of what exciting things could happen. And because we have very few minutes left, we're gonna ask you rapid fire at your tables this time to get ideas on that paper that you think are worth pursuing and really exciting. And they could be absolutely easy, quick, cheap actions that we could do tomorrow. They could be illegal things. They could be really big re-imagining. This table over here I sat with for five minutes and they had some absolutely huge ideas about how to totally revolutionize local engagement. Think about the fact that people don't want to come to meetings anymore. What could engagement look like if we revolutionize it? Okay. So get some ideas on the paper and thank you all for coming. Thank you at White River Valley School and Equity and Inclusion Committee for joining us. And very much to see them.