“Listening is an art requiring discipline and training. This art includes asking the right questions about families, neighborhoods, and work. Questions that encourage a person to speak about what they feel is important. In articulating one’s own concerns, a person may for the first time be making clear to themselves what those concerns are.” — From the IAF’s Organizing for Family and Congregation

In September 2018, the Uncompahgre Valley Alliance membership voted to focus our work on systematically working through the organizing cycle, which is to:

• Rebuild and revitalize UVA membership.
• Identify issue(s) we can focus on to work toward a public action that we can win.

Some of our members have been involved in our Alliance for a long time, some only more recently. Yet we have all been involved, to some extent, in the effort to return to best practices of grassroots organizing. There’s been lots of excitement and certainly some challenges. We are now in our Issue Identification Conversation (IIC) Campaign. Issue Identification Conversations can have three purposes:

• To identify issues.
• To identify leaders.
• To mobilize organized people for an action.

Issue Identification Conversations are meetings of 8-12 people hosted at a member’s house to answer the question:

“What are the pressures on you, your family, your neighbors or friends that keep you (or them) from providing your family with the life you would like to be able to provide? or that keep this from being the community you would like it to be? Think of an experience you have had that will show us how you have been affected by telling us that story.”

Over the course of these conversations, we are looking for themes that come up repeatedly to help us identify an issue. At this point in the process, we are not looking for solutions. That will come once we have met our goal of having this conversation with 200 people. In this context, an issue is something specific we can work to hold our elected officials accountable to change for the common good. As we begin, the first step will likely be a small one. Our Alliance has scheduled 14 IICs in various neighborhoods of Montrose County, including one to connect with CASA youth, ages 18-24 years old.

As the Chair of Uncompahgre Valley Alliance, I am excited by the conversations we have had and the response to this campaign. It is a connecting experience to hear the stories of friends and neighbors of what is important, challenging, and motivating to them about our community. At this specific time in our nation, and in the Western Slope, sharing in conversation is indeed the most important action.