Over the past couple of months, the Floyd County Library has been hosting the ‘This is What Democracy Looks Like’ Civic Engagement sessions. These sessions were aimed at young adults and older, and served to educate people on how to get involved with different aspects of their community.
With a total of seven sessions, this event covered a lot of different topics. From civil discourse to running from office, the panels for each session had plenty of information to give.
The event was put together and hosted by Librarians Alex Steppe and Sharon Frank, as well as Customer Service Liaison, Caleb Brison. Each session had a different panel of speakers with one of the three hosts acting as a moderator.
The first session was civil discourse. This session had four speakers, including social worker Joe Sheppard, IUS professor Dr. Margot Morgan, Alex Steppe, and Caleb Brison. The topics covered this night were connections/emotions in civil discourse, the history of the Left/Right divide, cultural humility, and logical fallacies. If you want to read more about the first event, follow the link here to get to the News and Tribune article covering the event.
The first session was used to discuss tools that people could use throughout the other events to better understand the following topics. In the sessions that followed, different panels of speakers talked about how to get involved in your neighborhood through neighborhood watches and lawful assembly, joining/starting Parent Teacher Associations and running for school boards, starting unions and self advocacy in the workplace, and the most recent session, which was about how to identify local issues and assess political candidates.
At the end of each session, the moderator provides the audience with an actionable goal that they can take home and do themselves. This gives people a chance to implement what they have learned during the session. At the beginning of the following session, people are given a chance to discuss how they accomplished their goals, and ask questions about the goals and methods of reaching them.
If you are interested in learning about civic engagement, feel free to come to the last two events. In the session on May, 31st, we will be talking about how to run for office, vote, and how to lobby for political issues. The final session on June, 14th, will be an overview of everything that was talked about so far, as well as a chance for people to ask any questions they might have about previous sessions. You can register for these sessions at the library’s event calendar here.
