The Newton Community Association held a public forum today to follow-up the public meeting from January. Great dialogue from the community and I’ll have more observations on that soon, but tonight I have some writing to do for a deadline, hopefully before my power goes out!
However, often I find the smaller moments at events like this are the ones that really make it all worth it. Moments when guards are dropped and two people just connect for a moment as humans. Today tears, more than a few hugs, funny moments and endearing ones were shared, between and around the timeline and agenda of a public forum. And for each of you who shared those moments, thank you. 🙂 Pushing mountains is hard to do on your own, but together, anything is possible.
Westcoast Views with Laila Yuile 
Over a decade ago, I was party to three telling presentations, the most important of which dealt with the costs of doing well up front as opposed to paying the cost later, particularly as it related to early childhood education, stay-at-home parents and the implications this had on health and judicial/incarceration costs a generation along the continuum.
Specifically, a society that looks after its citizens well enough that one parent can be with children through the first three years of life tended to halve the costs of health and incarceration with that generation.
We are currently in a frame where we have several generations brought into society without community support and without freedom from want and are paying a price in whatever ails society, as we see in the current impasse in Surrey.
We now are put in a position of rebuilding the supportive community while we also deal with the fallout of letting matters get out of hand, hence, we need double investment in remediation and support until we achieve a different equilibrium.
We cannot do that in the context of chasing the kind of economic growth advocated by our current administrations at all levels, so there has to be a long-term political shift as well as an attitudinal shift that will line up those people who, like the figure illustrated in this post, are willing to put their shoulders to the wheel to not only resolve the current crises, but also to create the conditions that will make such crises a thing of the past.
The kind of consultation that seems to be happening in Newton now is a great start, and posts such as this carry the process just that little bit farther.
How many will join the fray and with what level of commitment and persistence?
Keep pushing, keep watching. Thanks.
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it seemed more of a campaign stop for the mayor than a forum she took over before showing up and deflected her answers. She kept repeating that they were working to improve but would not try to hire more officers than was were promised last election.
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restricting the public.?
http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/when-public-records-are-less-than-public-how-governments-try-to-use-copyright-to-limit-access-to-data/
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Solution to murder rate in Surrey. Send more cops to Newton bus loop to hand out tickets to smokers and hide behind Coast Capital Savings Newton Sign and entrap jay walkers. True. I saw the cop hiding behind the sign and caught someone. Good detective work. Hard on the Julie Pascall case.
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