Mountain Lake, MN

It’s time for a Future Squad meeting!!!  I have reserved the room at City Hall for next Wed. Jan 23 at 3:30.  This is the Community, Cultural, and Civic Engagement Squad, and we will be primarily brainstorming ideas to engage the community and reduce poverty.  As a reminder, some of the things we talked about earlier were:  A community block party, community bingo, an after school program, and offering study circles again using the race curriculum.  These and any other ideas are open for discussion.  The idea is to get several people in the room and BRAINSTORM.

Hopefully you can make it on Wed. and please feel free to pass the word along to others that you think would be interested.

At our last meeting, we decided too not spread ourselves to thin.  We are going to consolidate the Civic Engagement and Community and Cultural Engagement Future Squads into one area.

There was a lot of interest from people to participate on both Squads anyway, so hopefully this will be a good merge.

If you’d like to get involved, contact Tara @ 427-8953.

The date is Dec. 3rd from 7p-8:30p at the Community Center. Free childcare is available. You will need to contact Tara @ 427-8953 if needed.

Our meeting on the 6th went well, but we still need more people to get involved! People had a lot of great ideas, so we prioritized the top three and formed Future Squads. The areas identified were: Community and Cultural Engagement (having community block parties, working together with community Ed doing ESL, or a language exchange, a community lottery, and honest discussion about the impact of the different ethnic groups in our community) Civic Engagement-Leaders Focused on a Collective Future (The local ministerial assoc. would be actively involved in the future development and maintaining of our community, existing officials would invest in a mentoring process that develops the next generation of leaders, new elected leaders - school/city, no one runs unopposed) Economic Growth (EDA more proactive with current businesses, why don’t we have more industries? We have rail line and a major highway, new focus on our current strength of ethnic diversity as an economic assest, utilize the highway to promote Mt. Lake and bring people in, have a shop local program.

We voted on the areas we wanted to focus on, then we split into groups. We will be having a large group meeting coming up shortly. We’re waiting for Extension to set the date. I’ll keep you posted!

We participated in a visioning rally on Oct. 22nd. If you’re curious what we came up with, here it is:

Mountain Lake is a safe, progressive, family-friendly small town. With strong roots in diverse traditions, we support the spiritual and physical well-being of all our residents.

Mountain Lake has a diverse, entrepreneurial economy that grows at least one new business a year. Our young entrepreneurs are leading the charge with businesses that capitalize on our technological, environmental, and infrastructural assets. Our rich culture is reflected in our vibrant downtown.

If this is a vision of our community that you’d like to support, please join us. We will be getting to work making this vision a reality on Nov. 6th, 6PM, at Alliance Missionary Church. There will be a free dinner, and child-care available. If you need child-care, please call Tara Kleven at 42-8953 to register.

Also, don’t forget to vote on Nov. 6th!