(Photo: Locals of Sisters Country gather for Citizens4Community information and skill building session | Photo by Krystal Marie Collins)
Beginning in 2015 Sisters Country began implementing Speak Your Peace as a tool for discourse in civic matters. Speak Your Peace is a community-building tool that has been tailored by cities and organizations across the globe to help foster more constructive engagement and debate. The Citizens4Community effort is Sisters’ version of Speak Your Peace.
Citizens4Community hosted their spring quarter 2016 information and skill building session on April 27 with a turnout of dozens. During the session participants were able to discuss the nine simple tools of civility in break out groups. The tools include paying attention, listening, being inclusive, not gossiping, showing respect, being agreeable, apologizing, giving constructive criticism and taking responsibility.
Rob Karwath, national spokesperson for Speak Your Peace and president of North Coast Communications in Duluth, Minnesota says, “Sisters is a fairly typical example from around the country that has been hit by some sort of change which voided how civic problems and solutions where approached previously. For Sisters’ population, development, future growth, traffic, affordability of housing have all been recent changes. Instead of working through it, the community found themselves attacking each other. Sometimes an easy way to respond in these situations is lashing out. Speak Your Peace is a way to re-engage, it’s about bringing people to the table.”
Karwarth has seen much improvement in civic discourse in Duluth as a result of Speak Your Peace. Specifically, Deluth is now seen as a more welcoming place, experiencing more investment and involvement with younger citizens.
“I often get asked the question, why civility?” says Karwath. “It’s about creating environments where people want to engage. If you have an environment where people want to engage, the community will be on a faster track to finding solutions.”
Chair of Citizens4Community, Robyn Holdman says, “One of the great benefits of speaking with people about the Sisters Country Civility Project is that I’ve had the opportunity to meet with many of the small business owners in Sisters. I am thrilled to learn that many of these individuals support an effort to create a safe and respectful platform for communication to build off.”
However, Holdman still has concerns, explaining, “I have found it disheartening to hear from some of the business owners, that they remain fearful to speak up in public settings, for fear people who oppose their ideas will boycott their business or threaten to sue them. Citizens4Community realizes that our efforts to encourage respectful communication and to build trust will take time. We hope that our persistent and reassuring efforts will encourage greater civic engagement and will build, not diminish social capital in Sisters Country.”
Ann Golden Egle of Golden Vision and Associates believes, “Any business will prosper through employing the ‘9’ tools for effective and respectful interactions recommended by Citizens4Community. Today bullying and disrespectful communication is overlooked in too many organizations. This affects the bottom line through the high cost of turnover, lower productivity and reduced sales due to unhappy, even fearful workers.”
“We brought Speak Your Peace to the Tahoe region when I was CEO of Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation,” Lisa Dobey, executive director of the St. Charles Foundation explains, “We were concerned that our civic dialog was becoming more and more antagonistic. The worry was that people would simply opt out of the democratic process because it was becoming too contentious. Speak Your Peace didn’t solve all of the issues, but it was another tool in our tool box to encourage civility in public discourse and to develop a common language on appropriate ways to have difficult conversations in the public sphere. It’s true, isn’t it? It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.”
For more information on Speak Your Peace or Citizens4Community, see http://citizens4community.com/.
