Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

'Community conversation' draws 10

CLOVIS — About 10 people gathered at the Clovis/Curry County Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday night as the United Way of Eastern New Mexico continued its series of “community conversations.”

The goal of the events is to find out what issues are most important to people in Curry and Roosevelt counties.

“We don’t have a certain thing we’re looking for in terms of topics or ideas that we hope to hear; really it’s just been exciting to hear all the different things that are important to people and how they imagine different things,” United Way of Eastern New Mexico Executive Director Erinn Burch said. “We’re excited by the uniqueness of the conversations.”

Burch said Wednesday’s event was the fourth public conversation United Way has held, with somewhat mixed results.

Burch said the organization is looking for feedback from a wide range of demographics and so far there have been a couple of good, productive conversations and a couple where they did not get the participation they were hoping for.

“Sometimes it might take a couple tries to get the response from those groups that we wanted,” Burch said. “The middle school and high school teachers, we didn’t get a very high number of participants. We just need to do a better job of inviting them and letting them know what it’s all about.”

Burch said the United Way is just at the beginning of this process. Twenty-six more conversations are planned, with the goal of wrapping up by the middle of summer at the latest.

Wednesday’s conversation centered around child welfare and improving the community for young people.

Participants suggested that a community of working people could be developed by putting attention back on vocational skills and building young people’s self worth. The idea being that when young people have access to good jobs, they do not turn to crime or reliance on the government.

“We’re just happy that everybody is engaged and exploring and sharing,” Burch said.

United Way will release its findings from these conversations later this year.

“We’ll report out on any ideas that are repeated,” Burch said. “If we start hearing that something has really caught the attention of a broad range of people, then we’ll kind of bring out what we heard and go from there.”