We all want Sisseton to be an attractive, welcoming place. One of the Spring Sweep goals is to work on combating crime and graffiti. Several representatives of the city, city police department, probation officers, and concerned citizens have been meeting to come up with plans to help home and business owners deal with the problem of graffiti in our community.
Paint South Dakota is a community service program provided by the South Dakota Housing Development Authority. Each year community groups are encouraged to apply for the grant project. SDHDA provides primer and paint and a local community group provides the volunteer labor to paint the house. People can self nominate or can be chosen by a local group to participate. The requirements are:
1. The Nominee must own and currently live in the home to be painted. It cannot be a business, rental house, contain rental units or property used for other purposes besides a primary residence.
2. The Nominee must need their home repainted and would otherwise not be able to paint the house on their own due to financial or physical difficulty.
A group from Grace Lutheran Church will be painting a house in Sisseton this year. For more information or to get involved, contact Jeff Gregg.
The idea for the swap is to keep good, usable items out of the land fill and also to provide people in our community with free items that they can make use of. Lots of people were able to get rid of their C.R.U.D! (That’s Community Recycling of Usable Discards!)
This first swap was real success with 200+ items swapped and just a few things left over! There was everything from A to Z that people brought to swap including beds and bed frames, computers and scanners, bicycles, chairs, toilets, carpets, Christmas decorations, child booster and car seats and many other things! It’s amazing what people brought and what other people needed. It was a great event and more may be planned in the future.
Thanks to all who participated in the Swap, and thanks to Lindy Staub and the Sisseton Swimming Pool for all their help in arranging the event and providing the space for the swap.
Several community residents came together over a two-day period to help clean up Sisseton as part of the Spring Sweep. Several dumpsters, truck beds and trailers were filled with trash, trees and brush from the Cedar Park area and around the community.
Over 70 people were involved with the clean up including individuals and members of several community groups, such a 4-H Clubs, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Church groups.Thanks to all who helped with this community clean up!
Everyone who participated in the clean up received a $4 gift certificate from Horizons to a local restaurant. Garbage bags for the clean up were provided by Dakota Western Corporation at Agency Village. A big thanks to them for this donation!
As part of the follow up to the LeadershipPlenty portion of the Horizons project, the Horizons group created a survey to give to people at the 2007 Horse and Buggy Days. The group also had some Horizons water bottles created by Glacial Lakes Bottling to use as a marketing tool and to thank people for filling out the survey. To read the results of the surveys collected, click the link below:
2007-sisseton-community-needs-assessment.pdf
The information gathered will be used to create an action plan for Sisseton in the next phase of the Horizons project.
We asked the Horizons participants to give us their feedback about how their community is changing in the areas of Poverty Reduction, Increasing Leadership and Community Change. The next few posts are the responses to questions about each of those topics…
In what ways has this community’s knowledge about poverty changed? What evidence do you have of this?
Several people have read the Framework for Understanding Poverty by Dr. Payne. There are also many others reading the book by Dr. Payne titled Bridges out of Poverty. I know this because I have checked all the books out through my office.
Are more community members talking about poverty?
I believe there are more people talking and understanding poverty in a different light. There is a lot more work to do to get enough of the “right” people talking and coming up with solutions that will make a long term difference for people.
What kind of difference does it make if people in your community better understand the causes of poverty?
If people really understood we would actually come up with solutions. We need to get the people involved in solving the problem that are living in poverty what do they need? There are more resources than just dollars that people in poverty are lacking. It is a process that is going to take serious decision making by the powers to be to get people on the road out of poverty.
Written by Gary
The Sisseton area hosted a poverty workshop for employers and the Sisseton School District staff during the day. Later in the evening Kjerstin Smith also gave an hour and a half seminar about poverty to community members. There were about 23 community members there along with many SDSU extension members. Kjerstin talked about the different types of register for language, the hidden words behind each individual/town/culture, but the most important thing that she told us to not judge is the word “economic” and “culture”. They are two totally different topics but they are associated with poverty in some way, but not together. Poverty isn’t just about money, it’s about a lack of resources. Some families who live in poverty don’t want to leave poverty because they like their lives, besides the fact that they don’t have enough money, they are content with their lives. Some people in poverty are afraid to go into the middle class life. Just a fact that I learned last night was that an adult who is average, has a vocabulary of 900 words, while a three year old, wealthy lifestyle, has a vocabulary of about 1200 words.
Kjerstin also had the community members talk in groups at their tables about “Why did you come?”, ”What frustrates you or what gifts did you get out from working with a person who is in poverty?”
Another group question was, “What kind of situation, that you were in, made you feel out of place?”
She stated that each community has their own hidden rules. Sisseton doesn’t have a sign up as soon as you pull into town saying, “You can’t say this…, you have to do this…, or you have to wear this…”
People who are in poverty can feel hesitant about going to school because most schools are based on middle class lifestyles. That goes back to the question about the situation that made you feel out of place.
Since the seminar was only an hour and a half long for the community members, we as a community can get more information or resources about poverty and distribute it or present it to the community in the near future.
Every community has the opportunity to make a change, and this is just one step that Sisseton is doing to make that change.
People in our community have realized that there is poverty in our community, and it’s not just a lack of money, but we lack some resources. Many concerns were on the topic of a community center. There are community centers in different towns around Sisseton, but Sisseton itself does not have a community center. That is something that the Strategic Planning committee will incorporate into their plan.
Evidence of this is that many people are being more conservative and actually taking the time to realize, “I don’t need to go to Sioux Falls for laundry detergent because I can buy it at our local department/grocery store.” More and more people are staying in our town and supporting our local businesses. There are some items that you cannot buy in Sisseton, but that’s only a few things. Sisseton is looking into what their needs are through local governments and also non-profit organizations.
