Chronicle Editorial

Community leaders can guide us, but when is it time to vouch support?
     United Way of North Central Iowa stopped by Hampton earlier this week, its biggest turnout out of the five trips to towns it’s made thus far. United Way is a non-profit organization that aids in developing grants and supporting community programs. Its round of town visitations was meant to gauge the challenges facing small communities.
     The community meeting came up with a vision of Hampton as a place with expanded businesses that attract younger generations, while providing quality housing and transportation for current and incoming residents.
     The meeting, attended by 12 Hampton community leaders, was well intentioned and surprising in that 12 members was the highest that United Way has encountered. One would think that such meetings would generate traction among community members, especially when it was scheduled during the lunch hour. But out of a town of over 2,000 people, only 12 people showed up, and those 12 were already active in volunteer groups and government entities. They discussed items that are pretty much well known facts within Hampton and the county at large: there is not enough quality housing or transportation, and a lack of expanded business doesn’t create an environment for college graduates to return to their hometown.
     If the growing political climate of the last 16 years has portrayed anything, it’s that the status quo will always remain unless a group of persons unite towards a common goal.
     There is only so much community leaders can do. They try their best to be representatives of their groups, their thumbs on the pulse of what ails the demographics, but there comes a point when community leaders reach a wall, and that is with the community itself.
     Maybe it was too focused an advertisement for the community meeting, but it seems to be that everyone is talking in circles without much else to show, except they all agree on core issues facing the community.
     The Chronicle attempts to be the eyes and ears of the city, for those that don’t have the resources or time to go to afternoon meetings or after school meetings when families are sitting down to dinner. The Chronicle relishes the role of being somewhere that not everyone can be at, and report back the details. But a newspaper, just like its community leaders, can only do so much.
     The sentiment from the meeting was that solutions are available to fix all the problems facing the community, and they don’t appear to be impossible, as other communities have tried them before, but major barriers to any solutions are funding, and social behaviors (language barriers and understanding of the problems facing the community).
     Funding comes from taxes and grants, but grants only fund so much before taxes need to be levied. Solutions are simple until it requires individuals to agree and understand what the community is trying to do.
     Hampton has a plethora of community organizations that are highly active: there’s the Rotary, Kiwanis, religious groups, city council, Iowa Living Roadways, Healthy Harvest, and much more. Solutions are abound in any of these groups in regards to fixing problems facing the community. The problem isn’t coming up with a solution, its coming together to act on one solution. If all these community groups worked together, and the community itself came out to hear such solutions and discuss what a change would mean for them, then progress could be made in Hampton.
     Meetings are great at bringing people together, finding problems and proposing solutions, but there comes a point when the public should be more involved at putting their vote and voice to something to change the status quo.