In business there is a powerful concept for informing strategy, setting goals and priorities, “The Voice of the Customer,” which expresses customer value, why customers spend money with a company. Let’s think about a parallel concept for the Study Group: “The Voice of the Community.” If you think about it, one reason Chattanooga Venture was so successful was because it channeled to Voice of the Community. The other reason it was successful was because it turned that talk into action. Going forward, I would like to have the Study Group focus on this challenge: How do we channel the Voice of the Community? Where should we go and to whom should we listen? We will start with your learning objectives and projects and intentionally identify, engage, and capture inputs of various stakeholders. Your “job” as Study Group members will be to identify points of engagement: dates & times, locations, stakeholder representatives, etc., to engage community members. We will use Venturing.Chattanooga.Digital <https://venturing.chattanooga.digital/> as our online home for coordinating and discussing this work. What do you think about this? Can you identify points of engagement? This will be the major topic for our next regular meeting on April 7th. In parallel, we will develop means to do the actual listening. We are going to re-establish a Facilitator Bank like Venture had. Members of the bank will go through a learning program about community engagement and facilitation that will involve facilitating multiple “Community Confabs.” We will deploy local, community-based social media platform as a tool for engaging community members, gathering inputs to the Voice of the Community, and sharing results (specifically, we are actively evaluating Friendica <https://friendi.ca/>, an open source, global, decentralized social network, for these purposes). If you’re interested in joining the Facilitator Bank or previewing Friendica, let me know. More on both of those topics soon! — Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. Executive Officer and Principal Eduity, LLC www.eduity.net greg@eduity.net 706-271-5521