Media Impact Focus of Community Conversation

The impact of the media on politics will be the focus of two community conversations this week – one on Thursday and the second on Saturday.

Both will be at Sheridan Memorial Hospital’s community room on Gould Street, with Thursday’s conversation from 2 to 5 p.m. The Saturday event will be from 9 to noon.

The event is hosted by the Center for a Vital Community, and Amy Albrecht, who’s director of the center, said the focus of the event is listening and understanding.

Albrecht said no RSVP is required, all people have to do is show up for the sessions.

She said Saturday provides another chance for people to participate if they can’t make the session on Thursday.

Albrecht said the Center for a Vital Community launched the community conversations about two years ago and holds them in the fall and spring. She said this week’s conversations are the final ones for this spring, but the conversations will resume in the fall with a community conversation in October on the question of “What do you look for in a leader?”

Albrecht said the idea for the conversations came with a feeling that it was time, in fact past time, to look at civility and kindness. She said that became the Center’s initiative, to model having hard conversations around really contentious topics without those conversations turning into attacks.

She said the conversations become less about reaction and more about responding in kind.