Lexington's Groundbreaking Civic Assembly

That's fascinating.

I actually didn't really know that it was that recent that Civiclex blossomed in its staff capacity.

My sense from talking both to you and to your boss, Richard Young, is that you're really more about getting good work done than tooting your own horn.

But I think there's a really good story to tell that involves some horn tooting.

What is Civiclex doing well and how did it grow into the role it has today and this growth you've experienced the last few years in particular?

I will say, I think Richard is pretty good at horn tooting.

I'm not going to lie.

A lot of his work is trying to communicate to the broader field what we have going on here in Lexington, because it's hard when people aren't witnessing it directly.

So that is, I think, a skill he's really developed.

But yeah, in my mind, there's three things that Civic Lex is doing really well.

And they're the three things you already mentioned and the kind of three things we think about our programming through.

So...

The overall goal is to strengthen our community's civic health, make it easier for people to get involved in local government.

We're really trying to tackle that from multiple angles.

We're trying to balance ourselves out, I think, with the different programs we use.

But I think we do a really incredible job of giving people reliable and trustworthy information about local government.

We teach it in high schools and middle schools.

We have a weekly newsletter about what's going on in City Hall that Many people I know rely on back.

Again, this is a little bit of the earlier days, but I was helping cover the redistricting process in Lexington in 2020 and writing about it in our newsletter of what had happened at the last meeting.

And I was in a meeting and they were handing out printed out copies of our newsletter to catch up their own members of their commission on what had happened at the last meeting.

Because no one else had any record of it.

So I think we provide really reliable information.

I think we have a really interesting way of working with local government to make their processes more accessible.

That's a lot of where I'm operating.

So that's that collaborative governance, civic transformation, whatever you want to call it.