The Daily Herald announces a campaign to build communities
To our Readers:
When The Chicago Community Trust was founded, banker Albert Harris hosted a meal that gathered people of goodwill together to talk about how to improve life in the Chicago area.
Since then, the Trust has awarded about $1.8 billion in grants to thousands of nonprofit organizations throughout the area — all designed to make our corner of the world a little bit better place.
As a way to celebrate its 99th anniversary, the Trust hopes to spark 1,000 mealtime conversations on May 12 similar to the one Harris led.
These community-building get-togethers will pull together small groups of civic leaders and ordinary people, and the Daily Herald plans to host several of them.
These “On the Table” conversations have only one agenda — generating ideas and building collaborations to solve our problems and build stronger communities.
It could be a project to combat heroin abuse; a way to sustain the arts in the suburbs; an innovative approach to encourage healthy lifestyles. Those are a few of the challenges we could engage.
I'll write more about all of this later, but right now we need your ideas. What should be the focus of these group conversations?
This isn't aimed at politics. It's aimed at real problems, real possibilities. Drop me a line. Give me your ideas.
John Lampinen
Editor
jlampinen@dailyherald.com