Hello friends of Xenia,

Well, it’s summer again, and this year we’re trying something new.  Even though summer is usually more of a down time for us, a time when we work on ideas for our dialogue sessions, public events, and series for the website, we’ve decided to offer a couple of summer programs this year.

First, we’ll be offering an event series this summer for our existing dialogue fellows.  We’re going to treat it like Phase II of our traditional dialogue series, which means we’ll be looking at an issue area from several different angles.  After talking it over with our dialogue fellows, it was decided that the issue area we would most like to study is water.  So in five sessions this summer, we’ll be looking at the natural water cycle, problems with water usage and conflict, water issues in Oklahoma, and water issues in Norman.  At each session, we’ll have an expert on the topic who can help us dig deeper into various questions and ideas.  We’ll also be holding some sort of concluding event to talk about ways we can get involved locally.

What excites me most about this series is that we’ll be treating it like a prototype for future Phase II dialogue units.  The summer session will give us an opportunity to examine what works, what doesn’t, and how we can be most effective in learning about an issue area.  The dialogue fellows and other participants have agreed to help me in assessing the program and determining its strengths and weaknesses.

Also this summer, our third phase dialogue fellows will be participating in a book study.  We have chosen a seminal work on community engagement and volunteerism to study, Paul Rogat Loeb’s Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in Challenging Times.  This book takes a look at activists and community volunteers through the last century and talks about volunteerism and civic engagement as a extension of good character and sound principles.  It is our hope that this study will guide our conversations on what Xenia’s civic engagement and community participation will look like in the coming year.  Some members of Xenia’s board and staff will be participating in the study as well, so I look forward to some great dialogue.

As always, you can keep up with our topics, discussion, and thoughts from our dialogue fellows on Dialogic, Xenia’s online magazine.  I look forward to reporting great things from our summer activities and wish you all a great period of recreation and relaxation.

Clint