Last night in Glassell Park, a Leadership Academy training session was held for neighborhood councils ("NCs") hosted by "EmpowermentLA" (aka "Dept. of Neighborhood Empowerment"). These are free to all to attend but designed mainly for NC boards to be able to do the best job possible with outreach and all else that NCs are supposed to do. There are 95 certified
The Glassell Park Community/Senior Center is a good local location but the Northeast region NCs tend to be no-shows for general and citywide activities (and too many very local ones, as well) as I have observed over at least the past 5 years. Eagle Rock NC is the one I am most familiar with from serving on the board. Until the election last year, you did not find board members attending events that were outside of Eagle Rock or that were not coinciding with the monthly board meeting. Even events held in Eagle Rock had few or none of the board members present, not including myself as present which is what I became accustomed to experiencing.
The current board, with the newly elected 14 members, has a few more persons that have shown up at some meetings other than ERNC-held meetings. Most of these new members, however, and the few old ones, have not ventured any further from Eagle Rock than happened last term.
Last night's meeting had a relatively low turnout of NC board stakeholders or board members from the Northeast area considering (a.) the site was local, and (b.) that the material was designed to get more effective activity in the community with examples of other NCs hosting a disaster preparedness/CERT fair, jointly sponsored by numerous NC at a local LAFD station that had good support in the planning and a good attendance on the event day.
Election for NCs are coming in Spring 2014, so early election outreach training was included which covered a lot for NC to use in order to promote and to encourage candidates to register, among other things. The presentation on how to reach people had a lot of new approaches for social media to be used in outreach and building connections to the public with information sharing. The more traditional methods of communication, namely direct mail and other printed matter, were included, but with evolving methods of selecting the target audience with assorted sorting available that could be tailored as appropriate to the material.
The Leadership Academy training is a useful resource so that the many tools for accomplishing the tasks. An NC thereby would not have to waste time and energy by having to start from scratch and re-inventing, or, in some cases, just discovering, the wheel.
Unfortunately, the low participation rate in overall training opportunities like this one and for many others will still not produce the improved results to the levels that are expected. An NC and its board, not having any participants at all, leaves them missing opportunities to maximize results of the limited time any NC has to apply to activities, as well as not finding things that might very well get more results by applying what's been presented.
What's most valuable in the training being offered is having an exposure to many more choices and opportunities to use as needed which have been used before, "tested," if you will, so that these tools will be used with a better certainty of effectiveness than simply having an NC going it alone, absent the shared experiences available here.
So, like lots of training and information sessions with the NC system, a lots of the persons and groups that could benefit or be fully informed very easily by many assorted activities will work without the assistance, and as I see it, work at a level well below what could very simply be realized for a relatively small investment of time.
And that's the way the system is, as many NCs seem to have a collective and/or individual view that no other assistance is needed and all is fine. Unfortunately, the choice should be considered with and end to providing your stakeholders with the best service possible in place of what board members consider as personal goals and agendas that are their priorities.
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