Page 33 - BigConversationsDismantlingRacism

Planning Committee Roles and Responsibilities

Commitment to a community effort like this quickly begins to look like a full time job.
Planning committee members have to work together and be willing to take on specialized
roles. During the course of planning for the Big Conversation, members assumed the
following key responsibilities:

Steps Action(s)
Committee Chair Having a strong committee chair is important. Ours had led the
Big Conversation team since its inception so she had several
years’ experience in this role. A retired educator, she was a
strong leader and an expert in planning, organizing,
documenting, communicating and following up on tasks.
Logistics This person takes on the role of facility planning, set-up and
tear-down for events, liaison with other sites and personnel. It’s
critical that he or she work closely with the chairperson.
Electronic Effective outreach to the community is no longer viable without
communications, online connectivity via email, web sites and social media. Two
including the of our members partnered to share these technical
clearinghouse web responsibilities. One did double-duty as liaison for audio-visual
site, event registration requirements and also acted as moderator for our recent Big
and associated Conversation panel discussion. The other provided expert
database support for our event registration process.

Outreach/Publicity As important as electronic connectivity is, some people still look
at bulletin boards and read the newspaper. Posters, flyers, letters
to the editor and press releases to local newspapers are
important. All of our committee members shared in the many
associated tasks.
Bringing Diversity to The original planning committee members were all White,
the Committee representative of the M&SP congregation. They realized that
they needed to make the committee more representative of the
community if they wished to interest people of color and draw a
meaningfully diverse crowd to events. Two prominent African
American citizens of the local community, one representing the
NAACP and the other the Concerned Black Women of Calvert,
accepted the invitation to join in this endeavor.
Facilitators Our two experienced mediator/facilitators shared the effort of
reaching out to other trained mediator/facilitators. Mediators for
almost two decades, with ten years’ experience in facilitating
difficult community conversations, they had contacts and
relationships with colleagues from the two local Community
Mediation Centers and others around the State of Maryland that
enabled us to put a large team of facilitators together for these
events.

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