Elevate Othello to host community meeting Friday
OTHELLO — Organizers of the Elevate Othello project will be holding a community meeting and dinner in Spanish and English Friday from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Othello Church of the Nazarene to discuss community priorities and advancements in Othello.
RDI Bilingual Program Training Associate Ada Márquez Acevedo, who will be leading the Spanish portion of the event, spoke about what led to organizing the community meeting.
“This past September we had a community prioritization meeting. So all that means is that we (had) the community come together and then work through some of the areas that we've heard that were priorities through the focus groups, surveys and interviews that we did,” Acevedo said. “From that, we identified general areas of things that people in Othello want.”
The five emerging priorities Elevate Othello found, according to the city of Othello website, were a community center, communication across the community, library expansion, Latino and Hispanic cultural events and access to locally grown foods.
According to the website, the Elevate Othello program is a collaborative project implemented by Rural Development Initiatives, Inc. using funding from the United States Department of Agriculture Rural Development department’s Rural Placemaking Innovation Challenge. RDI is partnering with the city of Othello and other groups for the project.
“We have a steering committee,” Acevedo said. “The steering committee is composed of city (officials), but also local organizations and community members. It's kind of like a stakeholder group.”
Acevedo elaborated on the sessions and research to find Othello’s community priorities.
“They were imagination sessions, so we just let them ramble. And then this meeting is for us to put all the cards on the table and say, ‘Okay, these are all the things that as a community we want, but we only have so much time,’” she said. “We only have so much capacity to get some of these done so let's, as a community, prioritize which things are the most important.”
The event flier on the city of Othello website requests that participants RSVP to the event by Tuesday.
“We then decided to do working plans. So now we have the general priority areas, but what does that look like, right? What's the next step? So, that's what we're figuring out this Dec. 8. What does a shared community space look like? What does that mean?” Acevedo said. “What doors do we need to be knocking on? So we're gonna put a lot of the specifics to these huge, still very large priority areas because they can look many different ways.”
According to the event flier, organizers can also provide childcare and transportation if needed.
“We always encourage people to advocate for themselves, so if there's anything that anybody needs in order to show up, we are willing to work with that person,” Acevedo said. “We don't want anything to make folks feel that anything is holding them back.”
Acevedo then explained the primary goal of the community meeting.
“People are going to sign up to do tasks at the meeting,” she said. “Hopefully by the end of the December 8th meeting, people are leaving with some actions that they can then do. Working groups is what we're calling them, for each priority area, and then within their working groups, they are supposed to complete certain tasks that they made — it's not that we're telling them, right? They're coming up with these things themselves, we're just facilitating the process.”
RDI and Elevate Othello will continue to be involved with those working groups after the event.
“Once those working groups are formed then we can provide some more coaching,” Acevedo said. “But we need to get to the working group stage so we have leaders that are committed to doing things.”
Acevedo said about 15 people attended the community meeting Elevate Othello put on in September, and that hopefully even more will attend Friday.
“We're hoping so many that we freak out and we don't know what to do, that we worry about fire code,” she said. “We just really encourage people to come (and) make their voice heard.”
Gabriel Davis may be reached at gdavis@columbiabasinherald.com. Download the Columbia Basin Herald app on iOS and Android.