Building Community: Marion Connects and the Heart of Marion

The origin story, as I would tell it, which I'm sure there are many versions, but because our administration here at City of Marion does not like anecdotal information, we like to actually listen to our citizens.

I ran across an opportunity through University of Illinois Extension and my relationship with Susan Odom to host an event called Reversing the Exodus, which we held at the MantraCon slash Greater Egypt office, good partners of ours.

The panel is high school and college age folks.

And the short version of a long night of question and answer with a really engaged audience is what would make you stay in your town? Or after you go off and do college, military, trade school, Peace Corps, explore the world, what would make you return? And so it was a great session.

Mayor was there asking a lot of questions and taking great notes and everything.

The follow up to that was John Shadowins coming to the city and saying, you know, based on that feedback, what can we do? And so a group of do-gooders started meeting and a lot of plans talked about and a lot of names, a lot of bylaws discussed, things like that.

And before they even were formalized as a 503 whatnot, one of the things that I threw out them was we are finishing up the end of a three-year renovation of our downtown Tower Square Plaza.

but unless we activate this asset and show people that it's the people's plaza for their events they're never going to go on to the circle in the middle because the former circle just wasn't that usable for events so marion connects came along and i know they have spun off into all the things that i'll let amy tell you about but really third thursday was super meaningful to the city as far as getting the community to come to what is the only city-owned outdoor space.

If you think about it, the other outdoor space in our community is Park District.

So with that, Amy, tell us, pick up the story, pick up the baton about what all you all are up to now.

The origin story, as I would tell it, which I'm sure there are many versions, but because our administration here at City of Marion does not like anecdotal information, we like to actually listen to our citizens.

I ran across an opportunity through University of Illinois Extension and my relationship with Susan Odom to host an event called Reversing the Exodus, which we held at the MantraCon slash Greater Egypt office, good partners of ours.

The panel is high school and college age folks.

And the short version of a long night of question and answer with a really engaged audience is what would make you stay in your town? Or after you go off and do college, military, trade school, Peace Corps, explore the world, what would make you return? And so it was a great session.

Mayor was there asking a lot of questions and taking great notes and everything.

The follow up to that was John Shadowins coming to the city and saying, you know, based on that feedback, what can we do? And so a group of do-gooders started meeting and a lot of plans talked about and a lot of names, a lot of bylaws discussed, things like that.

And before they even were formalized as a 503 whatnot, one of the things that I threw out them was we are finishing up the end of a three-year renovation of our downtown Tower Square Plaza.

but unless we activate this asset and show people that it's the people's plaza for their events they're never going to go on to the circle in the middle because the former circle just wasn't that usable for events so marion connects came along and i know they have spun off into all the things that i'll let amy tell you about but really third thursday was super meaningful to the city as far as getting the community to come to what is the only city-owned outdoor space.

If you think about it, the other outdoor space in our community is Park District.

So with that, Amy, tell us, pick up the story, pick up the baton about what all you all are up to now.