Leaders call first BIG meeting a success

By James Patrick Schmidt

Published Dec. 1, 2006

Students and community members can share their opinions on where they want the city to go in the upcoming years at the second BIG Idea Gathering on Dec. 7.

Though both BIG meetings were scheduled to occur this week, the second had to be postponed due to inclement weather. Tuesday's meeting occurred as scheduled.

According to a news release from the City of Columbia, the meeting will take place from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in the Performing Arts Center at Rock Bridge High School.

The Visioning BIG meetings are a part of Imagine Columbia's Future.

According to the City of Columbia's Web site, "It's a community-wide discussion where all citizens create a shared vision for Columbia's future. People will talk about what matters to them. They will discover shared goals and make plans to reach them."

Visioning BIG meetings are open to the public, and citizens of Columbia are encouraged to attend.

"The purpose is to get the citizens to share what their ideas of what Columbia should be in 10, 15, 20 years," Visioning Committee co-chairwoman Dianne Drainer said.

The first Visioning BIG meeting took place on Tuesday at Stephens College.

"I think it was a very huge success," Drainer said. "We had 301 citizens show up, and that was not counting all of the volunteers. We had a very huge turnout, and all the feedback I have received has been very positive.

Everyone was very excited about the discussion groups that they were a part of."

Visioning Committee Co-chairman Jeffrey Williams said he thought the meeting was not a total success.

"If you look at it as just in terms of the numbers, it met our expectations," Williams said. "If you look at it in terms of demographic diversity, I think we need to look at the numbers and see what groups perhaps were not reached and what we need to do to reach them."

Williams said communication is vital to involve everyone.

He said new methods of attracting individuals are required.

"We may need to build into the process more targeted efforts to reach certain groups, meaning young folks, old folks and minority groups," Williams said.

The meeting was conducted under the advisement of a consulting group.

"After some introductions, we split the crowd into groups of 12 or so, and they separated to different venues around the campus," Williams said. "All the participants had ample opportunity to share their views on what needs to happen in Columbia."

Drainer said each member of a discussion group had the opportunity to share all of their ideas with their group.

The group then prioritized its thoughts.

"At the end of the meeting, the small groups reported back their top five ideas out of their group to everyone," Drainer said.

The second Visioning BIG meeting will run the same way as the first.