Public Innovators Lab in the News!

Pottsboro residents share ideas to strengthen community (+video)

By Miranda Wilcox Herald Democrat

POTTSBORO — What kind of community do you want? This is just one of the questions Pottsboro Library Director Dianne Connery has been working to answer through a series of discussions hosted at the Pottsboro Area Library. By answering questions that examine what matters to individuals in a community, Connery is hoping to positively address ongoing issues in Pottsboro and help shape the city into what the community desires.

“It is a way for towns, municipalities and organizations to find out what really matters to the community,” she said. “… The only people who are experts on what the community wants are really all the people in the community. So it’s to find out what matters.”

To accomplish this, the library is hosting a series of meetings called Community Conversations. These meetings have welcomed as many as 15 people and follow a specific guide of questions to understand what matters to the people of the community. An important facet to this is to include a huge cross-section of the Pottsboro population, Connery said.

“We want people whose families have been here for 100 years, to people who moved here from Dallas three months ago,” she said. “We want young and old and all economic types. … Anybody who lives or works in 75076 (zip code) is encouraged to participate.”

She pointed out that, while having community members voice their opinions in organized meetings such as city council sessions is important, libraries are already a huge source of data and are normally trusted institutions within a community.

To read the entire article visit here!