Hot Springs, SD Horizons

Bloggers and Springers — Please read these questions and consider your answers. Our Horizons sponsors want to gain valid and reliable information about each Horizons community. The more you write, the better sense they can get about us, our strengths and weakness, and how they can support us through education, training and so on. HERE ARE THE APRIL QUESTIONS:

Please choose one or two questions in EACH category to address on your blog:

8. Sustaining action and creating structural change around leadership

What is your community’s plan for maintaining a strong community leadership system?

How can your community sustain the changes it has already made in its leadership?

What structural changes have been made in how the community does its work/makes decisions?

What structural changes have been made so that your community leadership sustains partnerships with others?

12. Sustaining action and creating structural change around community

How will your community make decisions about seeking further resources to support its plans?

Is a system in place to seek, receive, monitor and report on new resources to support community work?

Is a system in place to maintain contact with, or to continue to work with other communities? With your Delivery Organization? In other partnerships?

What new resources have been secured to assist the work of the community?

We are challenged by the state administrative leadership to address these questions in the course of our February blogging. What say you?

Category 3: Taking action on poverty

What kinds of concrete steps are being taken by your community to address poverty?
How did your community make choices about the actions most likely to have an impact on poverty?
How are low income involved?
How does your plan for poverty reduction link with existing leaders, groups and organizations?
What other partnership will help your community carry out its poverty reduction plan?

Category 7: Taking action on leadership

How has your community leadership expanded?
What changes have been made in who is now involved in leadership positions?
ü Are more people participating in leadership?
ü Are different kinds of people (representing more sectors or parts of the community) now participating in community leadership?
ü Does the community leadership reflect the community’s demographic profile?
ü Are more low income people participating in community leadership?
What changes have been made in the way your community recruits and trains new leaders? Sustains existing leaders?

Here is the Hot Springs Horizons Strategic Plan, which is final pending approval by the Visioning Committee. Upon approval the plan will be printed, and we will add the input of the Study Circles, Action Task Forces, survey respondents and others. We will announce a community event soon — to roll out the plan and recruit volunteers to work on teams to carry out individual objectives.

As you can see, the objectives are varied, ranging from children and youth projects, to tourism and economic development, to infrastructure, and more.Strategic Plan

I for one appreciate the positive comments appearing on this blogsite. Hot Springs has earned a reputation as a contentious community, but have we not learned how expensive this can be. Positive regard for each other’s contributions is healthier in every way, almost guaranteed to reduce property taxes! Truly we have much to appreciate, we are a unique community — blessed with a talented arts community, a powerful allied-health and complementary-health community, and a lot of smart creative people. We are blessed with location-location, as they say in Chamber circles, great climate, warm springs and a beautiful natural environment. We’re off the beaten track (off the Heartland Hwy, that is), but that is part of our charm. (Our amazing deer population is, for tourists anyway, part of our charm.) Working together we can all do better.

People will have an opportunity soon, to join teams to carry out Horizons strategic plan objectives. The unapproved final draft is elsewhere on this site, posted this date. Take a look to see where you want to plug in to help achieve a short-term or long-term objective. There is something for everyone in this plan.

I am beginning to see some changes in the community regarding the need to unify behind positive actions and get the issues that prevent us from moving forward behind us. A key thing that Horizons can do when they can point to successes is demonstrate that citizens with diverse views can,in fact, find common ground and really make things happen. Horizons needs to look at themselves as a group that can get people to work together in harmony to “make it happen”.