It’s a Tuesday night in downtown Bentonville, and a dozen Benton County residents are gathering at the Arvest Conference Center just off the square. Shana Chaplin is the chief program officer with the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute, and she’s brought all of these people together as part of their Civic Arkansas Listening Session tour.
“The fun part for me is that every community is different,” she said, “and so it's always exciting to get to meet local people in their space welcomed into their community to hear those unique aspects of their specific community.”
Chaplin said these listening sessions have a good news/bad news element. The good news is Arkansans are well connected and are very neighborly.
“What we don't do well is how do we translate that value into action,” Chaplin said. “So, how do we get more people at the table to help municipalities to help local community organizations solve some of those critical issues in their communities?”
One of the ways to do that is happening in this room: bringing together engaged community leaders across the county to move from awareness to activation. For Graham Cobb, he can’t remember exactly how he got involved.
“I got asked to be a part of Civic Arkansas or maybe I asked to be a part of this project…” he said. “After I read the 2023 Civic Health Index, I became fascinated with a number of the findings. What I loved about it was that it didn't just focus on voter registration or turnout, it focused on things like neighborliness and how willing you are to help folks.”
That Civic Health Index was released by the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute along with several other local partners and provides details on a wide range of indicators. It’s true that Arkansas has the lowest voter registration and voter turnout in America, but civic health is informed by other measures as well. Arkansans donate to religious and charitable organizations more than the national average. Cobb was the local leader of this listening session, and he said it’s vitally important to have these conversations here.
“With such a high growth area and so many people moving here from other places,” Cobb said, “it's so important to have the people that have built this town into what it is connect with the new folks and vice versa. Look, if you don't go to the gym very often you don't have the muscles you're used to having, and quite frankly we just don't have those muscles of conversation. How do we talk to people about really important things that we might not see eye to eye on and look for those similarities not those differences? I love that Civic Arkansas is doing just that helping us rethink how we talk about our communities.”
Ezequiel Tovar recently moved up from Washington County to Benton County. Tovar said civic engagement to him means being more involved at the hyper local level.
“What I'm most passionate about or interested in is infrastructure,” Tovar said. “Whether it be affordable housing, whether it be creating more walkable places, that's really what I'm more focused and passionate about is creating beautiful places that actually have an impact on people and actually improve people's lives.”
Throughout the evening, residents will have opportunities to share their thoughts in a variety of ways: through large group conversation, breaking up into smaller group discussions, and by also sharing their answers to prompts on sticky notes. Chaplin said one of the main takeaways she hopes people leave with is the knowledge that you may be more aligned with your neighbor than you expected.
“Especially in this sort of divisive political environment often people will say during one of these we really all wrote the same things on the charts,” Chaplin said. “We have a lot in common and we need to celebrate that.”
The Winthrop Rockefeller Institute plans on having a new version of these listening sessions this fall on college campuses. More details are coming soon about that. But for now, Chaplin and her colleagues will continue to go from county to county to activate more civic engagement locally.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The authoritative record of KUAF programming is the audio record.
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