Main Street Conference Kicks Off With Community Focus

Attendees of the 12th Annual Indiana Main Street Conference that officially got under way this morning were told community is the focus of their work.

That tone was set and effectively driven home by the conference's keynote speaker, Indiana first lady Judy O'Bannon, and Carter Wolfe, executive assistant to Gov. O'Bannon for community development.

"What is a community? A community is our family - our extended family," Carter told the opening session audience of approximately 50 participants. "Social involvement is required for community building. You can't be a citizen all by yourself."

It's that community spirit - as it is engendered in the work of the Indiana Main Street organization - that is needed to return our cities and towns, our state, our country into the place where people can be proud to live, O'Bannon said.

"I've seen Indiana towns with grass growing through the cracks in the sidewalks. I've seen the boards on the windows of shops that have closed," she said. "And I've seen those boards come down in Indiana towns, and the shops go back in.

"Indiana looks good," she added.

But technology is challenging Hoosiers and all Americans to re-examine what a community actually is and what the individual's place is within it.

"You can go halfway around the world and talk with someone with the click of a little plastic mouse," she said. "But you don't have the intimacy that you have with real communities.

"And when you learned what it is you want to know, you turn off the computer, then the light and leave the room," she said. " But in real communities, you're in it for the long haul for the good times and the bad."

Those real communities can only be successfully built by individuals joining together. It's the separation of individuals due to expanding technology that has caused communities to suffer, O'Bannon said.

"We're out of sync. There's an uneasiness about. An unprecedented search for meaning - a search for community," she said. "We need a sense of something beyond ourselves to give us meaning. It's so easy to get lost. We're too individualized, too specialized, too sanitized," O'Bannon said. "We need to get back to community. And I think the millennium is a tool to do that."

She challenged conferees to use their positions of influence in shaping their communities, to bring about a joining of technology and community, where the two build on the other, instead of pulling against each other.

"My call is for us to use high-skill, high-tech things to bring us all together as a community," she said. "It is our job to harness this thing we call high tech and find ways to use it to build our communities."

The Main Street Conference runs through tomorrow in Warsaw. Workshop topics will teach conferees how to develop strategies, raise funds, find volunteers and implement plans for revitalizing the downtown areas of their communities.