Speakers will talk about community, neighborhoods and local change at a community gathering Thursday, May 1, at The REC: Grange.
The event will be from 8 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. at 441 Chemawa Road N.
In addition to free breakfast, the event will include personal testimonies from Keizer community members and a brief workshop by internationally recognized speaker, Ben McBride.
“We really just want that space to build community and really emphasize the importance of lived experiences,” said Ashley Russell, assistant director of the Community Business & Education Leaders Collaborative.
The CBEL Collaborative, which is hosting the Keizer event, seeks to strengthen parents and support world-class education in Keizer.
“The event is open to anyone in the community who wants to help build what we call social cohesion,” Russell said.
The collaborative, founded in 2019, explains on its website that social cohesion means trust between community members on how to effect local change.
To inspire conversation, speakers will appear from neighborhood family councils – groups based in Salem-Keizer elementary schools that seek change through volunteerism.
Two Keizer neighborhood family council members are scheduled to speak. They are Ramiro Navarro from the Cummings Elementary School council and Ron Berkley from the Kennedy Elementary School council.
Speakers will share experiences growing up in neighborhoods with similar issues to Keizer – such as violence and high adversity, Russell said.
These stories will prepare audiences for McBride. An author and public speaker, McBride’s fluency in public safety and community change will “hone in on and amplify what the [council members] were saying,” Russell said.
“It’s not a problem-solving time. We are not trying to come up with solutions in the meetings, necessarily,” she said. “We really believe that social cohesion – trust between community members – leads to social capital…you have to have that foundational layer of trust in relationship before you can start coming up with solutions.”
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