Big Stone City is implementing the Horizons II Program

Big Stone City is one of 15 communities in South Dakota to be accepted into the Horizons II Program. They will be part of a 20 month grant program that has a very special focus: fighting poverty.

With the assistance of the South Dakota Cooperative Extension Service citizens of Big Stone City will take active roles in forging new partnerships, finding and enabling new leaders, and mobilizing around issues.

The first step in the program was to train 6 people to be facilitators. These people would oversee the Study Groups. The facilitators job is to make sure that everyone in the Study Groups is able to voice their ideas.

The second step in the program was to initiate three Study Groups consisting of 10 people each. On Sunday night October 19, 2008, citizens met at MacDaddy's and began signing up for the Study Groups. Study Groups will meet once a week for the next five weeks and are to come up with ideas on how to address poverty in their own community.

You can see some of the photos in the Gallery.

Horizons Tuesday meeting was held from 9:00 am to 11:30 am at the Tuesdays facilitators house (Nancy Nelson). There were 13 people present.

This was the first session :

> Getting to know each other.

> Talk about how we're connected to the issue.

> Begin to look at poverty.



The meeting was fantastic. People talked about how Big Stone City used to be.
BSC used to be a closely knitted community with ten or more flourishing businesses
including a Newspaper "The Big Stone Headlight." Cool.

Newsie

Horizons Tuesday meeting was held 9:00 am to 11:30 am November 18, at the Tuesdays facilitators house (Nancy Nelson).

This is the fourth session where we discussed ways to reduce poverty.

Our last group meeting will be Tuesday 11/25/08. After that meeting all three discussion groups will come together and share their ideas.

Residents of Big Stone City have completed the first phase of the program.

Three different groups had five meetings and discussed options for how to affect poverty in our community.

On December 8th all three groups came together and shared their ideas and voted on which programs to begin working on. We met at the Senior Citizens building and enjoyed pizza and birthday cake.

People are preparing to meet to discuss how to implement the ideas. Three of the plans include a city wide clean up and beautification of main street. Opening the senior citizens center more often and bringing residents in to socialize more during the colder weather.

The long term plan is to build a community center.

Wednesday the 10th of December many of the residents met to receive their certificates for participating and to talk about the next phase of the program.

Leadership Plenty will begin in January.