Jeff's Big Idea

Hi, everybody. Here's another idea for our class project. I've spoken to several of you about this and have been glad to hear your positive feedback. I'll outline it briefly here and hope for some further discussion.

Since our last meeting, I've been thinking a lot about the "Community Visioning" process that Alison and Phyllis presented to us that night, and that Myles and Lisa undertook years ago. Although my group's drawings were kind of weak, the exercise we went through was inspiring. I think it's very important to have a sense of community, especially in a growing town with a lot of history and such a promising future. We proved that night that we each value a lot of the same things about Park City, each has his own favorites, and that we're all very proud to live here.

In my breakout group, we talked about memories of our time in Park City and got to reminiscing a bit about our favorite times. That got me thinking about how to celebrate that and how to reinforce (and indeed to help define) the sense of community in Park City. In other words, how do we express the spirit we feel about our town?

Of course--we'll create a Yearbook! Imagine it: for each year you've lived in Park City, you could have a fine, bound book full of memories, headlines, photos, statistics, abd stories. I still have Yearbooks from high school, and flip through them from time to time. And I really would love to have one for each of my PC years.

OK, we'll skip the grids of pictures of every single citizen in shirt and tie. No point in even trying to do that. I'm thinking we focus on:

* events (World Cup, outdoor concerts, Clown Day, Park Silly Sunday Market, Jan's Winter Welcome, Barking Ball, Summerween)
* people / profiles (the mayor, old-time locals, business owners, Myles?!)
* sports (softball tournament, powder skiing, NORBA races)
* government (elections, landmark city / county decisions, current liquor laws, City Tour)
* lifestyle (more powder skiing, new trails, current routing of Tour des Suds, cocktail contest)
* news / headlines
* history (like "The Way We Were" from the Park Record)
* seasonal activities
* stats (snowfall, census data, skier days, lodging totals, budgets, school reports)
* lots and lots of pictures!

And we'll even leave a few pages blank for our friends to sign! Just today, I was remembering some friends who used to live here and who might have signed my 2003 Yearbook. I'd like to read what they may have written, and maybe dig up some pictures.

So, how does this meet the single criteria that Lisa laid out for us? Our project "must benefit the community in some way". Many of the other great ideas I've heard focus on solving a particular problem that we see in Park City: recycling, traffic, the environment, etc. The way I look at it, each of these issues is on our collective radar, and is being addressed to some extent already.

This idea is brand new! Nobody's doing it, we won't be stepping on anybody's toes. As far as I know, Lisa won't say, "my 12-year old nephew already did that". Hey, actually--maybe somebody's high-school-age kids could help us out.

I guess I already answered my question about how this would benefit the community. It would help bring us all together as a community and foster and preserve the sense of spirit in our town. (We could even devote some space to the "surrounding areas"...)

Maybe I'm starting to ramble, but I have a few more points to make. Maybe some Q and A:

Q: How do we pay for it?
A: Sponsorships and sales. I hope we could avoid straight advertising, and could model it after the Friend of Animals calendar--very classy, yet well-funded.

Q: Who's going to buy it?
A: Everybody. We'll make it nice, so everybody HAS to have one on their coffee table: locals, second-home owners, ex-locals, visitors. I've spoken to at least a small sampling from each of those categories, and everybody says: "I'd buy one!" In fact, I have a list of pre-orders already.

Q: Can we benefit [my favorite organization] with this?
A: Of course! If we do it right, we could turn profits over to the Peace House, Arts Kids, whatever. In fact, we could help benefit a different group every year!

Q: This idea is kind of weird, isn't it?
A: Yep.

Q: Who's going to take all those pictures?
A: We will solicit entries from the entire community. I'm sure we each have a handful of pictures, of which we are proud, that would be appropriate for inclusion.

Q: Why not a website instead?
A: Websites are cool and all, and are by their nature very dynamic. The beauty of a book is that it CANNOT change. It is a snapshot of our community, taken over the course of a particular year. It's meant to be left on a coffee table or collected on a bookshelf, and leafed through casually or used as a reference--for many years!

Q: OK, fine--I'm sold! How can I help?
A: That's another cool thing about this: we'll need all kinds of help. Like your high school's Yearbook Committee (though not as nerdy!), we'll need production people (layout, contents, printing), marketing, and sales. Of course, we'll have to think hard about how to ensure that we can continue the effort in perpetuity; we'll need people to work on that. And so on.

So, there you go. Sounds fun, right?

Jeff