U.S. Rep.’s Cleaver and Yoder won a civility award from Kansas City Consensus for their bi-partisan work in 2012. They’ll help launch a new effort in Kansas City next week.
U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) and U.S. Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) – known for their bi-partisan cooperation and friendship across the aisle – will help launch a new Kansas City chapter of The Village Square.
They’ll participate in the inaugural event on Wednesday, June 4 from noon to 1:30 p.m. at the UMKC Student Union, 5100 Cherry.
Here are more details from UMKC:
The Village Square is a model and a vehicle for civic engagement. The idea is to bring back the spirit of the American town hall and engage local citizens in civil discourse. The Village Square holds comfortable, casual forums and offers programming that bring people together for face-to-face interactions about polarizing issues facing local communities and the nation. The goal is to engage in dialog, build connections, seek understanding, and solve real problems.
The Village Square was formed after a divisive local referendum in Tallahassee, Fla. on whether to buy into a proposed coal plant. The debate quickly turned into an expensive PR campaign that obscured the facts more than it educated the citizens. Two residents on opposite sides of the issue – Allan Katz (then, a Democratic City Commissioner) and his good friend Dr. Bill Law (then, the Republican Tallahassee Community College President) – regretted the lack of what they considered “real conversations” about the coal plant, complete with an effort to understand facts and higher level reasoning. So they launched the Village Square there, “founded on relationships between people who disagree with each other, but still talk and may even occasionally like each other.” Since then, the concept has spread to three additional communities, including Kansas City, where Katz, a UMKC alumnus, recently joined the UMKC faculty after serving as U.S. Ambassador to Portugal.
This launch event will serve to introduce the Village Square concept to the people of Kansas City.
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