JASPER — Several local organizations will band together to kickoff a digital competition encouraging residents to learn, read, talk and do.
About 20 community leaders gathered Monday morning at the Center for Technology, Innovation and Manufacturing building at Vincennes University Jasper Campus for a final planning meeting for the ALL-IN initiative hosted by Indiana Humanities. The building will be the site of a launch event from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 16, for the online social media activity to help residents learn more about their area and the state as a whole.
“We work with communities all over the state and help create conversations,” Kristin Hess, communications and programs officer for Indiana Humanities, explained at the meeting. “One thing we wanted to focus on with the state’s bicentennial coming up in 2016, we thought it would be great if we could come up with a process to help people connect with their communities in new ways.”
Hess added that the initiative activities are rooted in the state’s Civic Health Index, created by the National Conference on Citizenship, which measures how healthy Hoosiers are in areas including willingness to work with neighbors to solve problems, voter participation and communication between residents about differing viewpoints.
The 16 ALL-IN challenges are broken down into several categories. “Explore” asks Hoosiers to listen to music from another country or taste ethnic cuisine. “Discover” challenges participants to share a photo of their favorite little-known site in the state. “Read” asks them to donate a favorite book to a friend or organization. Hess and Indiana Humanities Director of Communications Kristen Fuhs Wells, originally from Dubois County, showed the group how to use the website and connect their responses to Facebook and Twitter. The initiative challenges can be found on the ALL-IN website at www.indianahumanities.org/ALL-IN.
Campus Dean Alan Johnson became familiar with the program because Indiana Humanities has helped host the county’s Community Conversations series in the past. Johnson said this launch event will help with the rollout of the ALL-IN website, which went live in June and will remain active for at least one year. People throughout the county and state are encouraged to complete the tasks on their own and document their progress on the ALL-IN website using the interactive scorecard, but the Dubois County launch event will bring the opportunities into one place at a variety of activity booths manned by different organizations.
“One of the unique things about Dubois County is when somebody comes up with a good idea, all it takes is a few phone calls or emails and all of a sudden we have a multi-organizational planning group come together with a great deal of enthusiasm. By putting your creativity to work, we can have a really great effort in our area,” he told the group members. “You can see how your mission can fit some of these challenges.”
During the meeting, the local leaders parsed out who would help with which challenges. The local mayors have offered to help with the opening address. The VUJC bistro will serve ethnic foods to students during the week of the launch, the Sisters of St. Benedict will compile information about places of worship in the area and the Jasper Public Library will ask patrons to share stories about their favorite book characters. The event will also feature a quiz-style game show about Indiana history and statistics and prizes for those who finish all the challenges.
The leaders also planned to facilitate the creation and circulation of a huge timeline which residents could sign to show when their family members first arrived in Indiana. The timeline could be posted at different sites throughout the county during mid- to late-September, including at the Dubois County Museum and at the Jasper Train Depot during the Indiana Historical Society’s bicentennial train visit from Sept. 25 to 27.
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