Great Lakes Urban Exchange Sticky City Meeting w/ Guest Speaker: UWM Downtown June 10, 2008

Location website: http://www.msoe.edu/academics/outstanding_facilities/cc.shtml

GLUE (www.gluespace.org) is a regional project sponsored by the Brookings' Institution's Great Lakes Economic Initiative. GLUE aims to help reinvigorate cities like Milwaukee, Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, and St. Louis by learning from each other, finding common interests, and organizing to create a voice for innovation and needed changes in public policy. (Find our group on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=52199755005)

6:00-6:45 – How GLUE should work locally?

To varying degrees, GLUE group members are all working locally to improve and engage with their city, whether in their jobs, as volunteers, or simply by voting. GLUE wasn’t founded to duplicate the work others are already doing at the local level. GLUE exists to make connections and comparisons, to give people opportunities learn from each other, and to obtain support, encouragement, and insight from diverse but similarly challenged communities across a wide geographic spectrum.

This all sounds great – but what it means to any individual (or individual city) might vary. We want to empower our local GLUE teams to design their activities around what best suits them. So we’re asking each group to spend half of June’s meeting talking about that.

Here are a few discussion prompters:

1) What should the role of GLUE be in your city? Do you take the most value out of coming together with like-minded individuals across the region for some inspiring conversation? Do you want more “expert sessions”? Do you want local organizing and action?

2) What role should local meetings play in GLUE’s work? (Remember, this can be different for different cities!) An organizing forum for local efforts? A strictly comparison focused inter-city conversation? Mentorship? A virtual speaker’s bureau? A planning team for GLUE-related community events?

3) Does your local group want to take on a 6-mo. long project of documenting a certain issue in your city? Would you like to wage some sort of local action? (Keep in mind, we don’t want to be redundant with efforts that already exist.) Do you want to create a list of resources in your city for the civically engaged?

4) How can we engage a more diverse constituency in GLUE’s activities in your city?

5) Although we are planning GLUE’s major kickoff in Buffalo on June 21st, we would love for as many cities as possible to plan events around the launch of GLUEspace and the initiative this summer. Although we can’t promise financial resources, we can certainly assist in preparing materials, reaching out to the press, notifying our networks about your work. Would your city like to hold a summer kickoff event?

6:45-7:00 - GLUE Sticky Expert Session, Dave Reid from Milwaukee, who represents a group of citizens urging the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee (UWM) to make their plans for expansion downtown, rather than moving out into the suburbs. He’ll explain the situation, and talk about the organizing tools his groups has been using. Check out http://www.uwmdowntown.org for more info before the meeting.

The other GLUE city groups that are meeting at the same time will watch a live video stream of Dave's talk here at Bucketworks, and they'll be able to join us in the following discussion by phone and a chat system accompanying the video feed.

Originally we planned to only do this UWM Downtown presentation locally AFTER the GLUE meeting at 7:30, but we were invited to bring it into the meeting for all GLUE groups, so it won't happen after GLUE, as originally stated. Dave says he will stay and if after GLUE more people show up, he'll speak again at 7:30.

7:00-7:10 – Q&A with Dave (including GLUE people in other cities) to ask questions and allow conversation.

7:10-7:20 – Further discussion for other city participants: Did Dave’s presentation remind you of any situations in your city? What is the relationship like between urban universities and your town? How can these great assets become even more intrinsic parts of the fabric of the city? Is there other organizing that makes sense for your city that would follow the UWM Downtown efforts? Do you have any ideas for that group?

7:20-7:30 – Swap notes with our partner city and share.

That's it!

Here's what happened last month, if you missed it: http://www.bucketworks.org/content/great-lakes-urban-exchange-update-may-15

Official Website: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=52199755005