Community Cookout: July 22, 2023
The Payne-Phalen Community Cookout was the fourth in a series of five large public events created to gather residents, workers, businesses, and anyone involved in Payne-Phalen for an evening of good food, soulful music, and just hanging out with one another – by the lake on a stunning summer evening. The central part of the evening was focused conversations about the future of this part of the East Side. While we were eating dinner, our elected Community Council members led the group at their table in a game of cards that touched off conversations about the needs, hopes, dreams and aspirations of community members for the future of Payne-Phalen.
Conversations at each table were based on what each particular group found especially interesting, poignant, or urgent. The prompts for those conversations came from a series of questions and ideas that came up in earlier events PPCC held in the Fall, Winter, and Spring of 2022 and 2023. (More details on those events are at https://paynephalen.org/district-plan-2/). Before the Cookout, the list of questions and ideas derived from those events was published and crowd-sourced, both online and in-person at our monthly community meetings. From the crowd-sourcing we took the top 52, most relevant topics for further conversation and created a deck of playing cards. These cards were used as the way to start conversations at each table. (See photos inside report)
While playing cards and talking, each participant (and/or each conversation leader) made notes on their placemat. (See photos inside report). After dinner, we photographed all of the placemats. We collected up those that folks didn’t want to take with them. We also encouraged folks to keep their placemats and notes if they wanted – as a reminder of the evening and the importance of community coming together. If anyone wanted to keep their placemat, we photographed it first so that their voice and insights could still be integrated into the update of our district plan.
The engagement report for the event is posted here Engagement Data from Focused Conversations for public viewing and to generate further ideas and conversation. The report includes
- A list of the crowd-sourced questions, sorted by the major topic or theme of each question.
- A transcript of each placemat, combined into a single table.
- A few photos to help readers connect the dots.
In addition to playing cards and having focused conversations, we also generated ideas and feedback through “Community Art Shares” and “Board Member Art Shares” too!
At our August 2023 Community Meeting, the Council ‘walked-through’ this document, took additional feedback and comment from gathered community members, finalized their review and approval. Following that, this report was used to create and carry out engagement for our fifth in a series of five large public events, Uniquely East Side on September 9, 2023 along Payne Avenue.