More than 200 community members - including former Seattle Mayor Norm Rice -gathered at Northgate Elementary School on Monday night to advise Mayor Mike McGinn and his staff on what issues the city should focus on when designing the Youth and Families levy later this year.
Before the meeting started McGinn gave a speech highlighting the need to secure our future by providing opportunities to the children of our community.
"You are all in this room for the same reason I'm in this room," McGinn said. "We all want to learn how to build a future we want, and there is no better embodiment of that than with our own children."
After his speech people gathered into 16 focus groups, each with its own volunteer facilitator, to answer three questions: What do we want for our kids and families? What are the challenges to achieving our goals? And what are some solutions to these issues?
In the focus groups, participants shared their thoughts on what needed the most improvement in relation to their children's education. After answering the three questions, the participants ranked each issue to flesh out the main themes. They ranked the issues with multi-colored dots; the issues with the most dots were deemed the most important.
Once the more important issues were identified, each focus group selected a delegate to help represent their group at the Youth and Families Congress at the Seattle Center on June 5. The most important issues represented were lack of resources in the classroom to the need for more community support to keep kids in school and off the streets.
Although most of the participants found it difficult to rank the issues, everyone attended the event for the same reasons.
"We want to make our children safe, healthy and ready to learn - that's why we're here," Rice said. "With this meeting we have an opportunity to define where we want our city to be. This is what civic engagement is all about."
The meeting at Northgate Elementary School was the second of five events that the mayor has planned to help him learn more about the issues that are affecting the Seattle youths and their families.
"This is just the beginning of the process," McGinn said. "We have many town halls left. But we need the community's help to solve some of these problems."
"This was a huge success," said Bob Lebo, who was selected as the delegate of focus group No. 7. "This week is another great turnout. We're on the right track."
For updates on when the next meetings will take place and for summaries of past meetings, visit www.youthandfamilies.seattle.gov/[[In-content Ad]]
