Input Needed for the 100 Best Communities Application

Thursday, March 1st, marked the beginning of the process to again compete nationally to be named one of the 100 Best Communities for Young People.  It is pretty amazing that Lakewood has been awarded that honor five times in a row.

The application consists of gathering data about the City - stuff like population, graduation rates, pre-school enrollment, and such - but the bulk of the application are narrative questions that summarize our city in terms of how we serve youth and how we are planning on ways to serve them even better.  Much has to do with the five promises - Caring Adults, Safe Places, Healthy Start, Effective Education, and Opportunities to Help Others.

It is easy for me to pick up a phone and call a few people and get tons of information about what they and their respective agencies do.  It is also extremely easy to "cut and paste" last year's text into the 2012 application and voila - hit the submit button.  But the "not-so-easy" part of me wants to learn more and get way more people involved with this process than the usual "choir members".

The fact is that there is amazing stuff going on in Lakewood that I don't know about - programs that will "wow" the good folks at America's Promise and ING to again, help us to be named one of the 100 Best.

So I created a new page on the Lakewood's Promise web site.  The page has a "freeform" form (say that 3 times fast) for members of the community to give me, and the rest of the editing team, ideas of what to include in this year's application. You don't have to answer all (or any, for that matter) of the questions and I am not looking even for complete sentences.  I am just looking for ideas, thoughts, programs, successes, failures, dreams, etc that could be included in the 100 Best application.

To sum it up - this is all of our community - and all of our young people.  Let me know how we have created a great city for them to live in. So please - help me by sharing your thoughts.
Thanks,


Kurt Sample
Coordinator, Lakewood's Promise
http://lakewoodspromise.us