Mannakee Circle Group

Wide-ranging community change project that had, at its core, a series of well-crafted dialogues. This project illustrates how much work it can take to get a discussion guide right -- and how effective a good one can be.

Mannakee Circle Group president Brad Rourke was asked to work with the Northwest Area Foundation and the Study Circles Resource Center (now named Everyday Democracy) to develop a discussion guide to help communities work on poverty.

The result is Thriving Communities: Working together to move from poverty to prosperity for all, a guide that helps people look at poverty in their community and discuss what it looks like, why it exists, and what can and should be done about it.

Extensive research, including survey and focus group work, is behind this document which, while issued in 2006, is still in widespread use today.

This discussion guide has been used in hundreds of communities, by thousands of people, across the eight northwestern United States. The leadership and capacity development program that Thriving Communities is a core element of has produced deep and lasting positive impacts among the communities that have taken part.

From the introduction:

People in communities across America want to live in a place where they have the chance to thrive. This is true in all kinds of places: small towns, rural areas, urban neighborhoods, American Indian reservations, and others.

People talk about it in different ways. But when they talk about what holds their community back, one thing that comes up is poverty.

Poverty is everywhere. It may look different in rural places than it does in cities or suburbs. It may look different on a reservation. But there are things about poverty that look the same in all these places.

Poverty may look different to each of us. A single parent may see the cost of housing in terms of how many jobs it takes to pay for a place to live. To a senior who lived through the Great Depression, poverty today may not look all that bad. For people who live on tribal lands, losing their culture and land may be worse than lack of money. People new to the United States may think life here is not as hard as it was back home. For those who live in a community where almost everyone is poor, it is hard to imagine what life without poverty would look like.

This discussion guide will help us talk about the kind of community we want to live in. No community is doing well where there is poverty. If we work on getting rid of poverty, we can have a better community. And, by working on making our community better, we can help reduce poverty. These two important tasks go hand in hand.

Poverty affects us all. Even wealthy parts of the community are touched by poverty. We need to share our vision of what kind of community we want. We need to take action to change things so that we all can thrive.

The discussion guide is available as a free download from the Study Circles Resource Center here.