LAFAYETTE PARISH — Thursday marked the last day of Big Towns Summit. Event host Christiaan Mader, editor and chief of The Current, describes the summit as an exchange.
He says that mid-size cities like Lafayette face similar issues and similar resources, so the summit focuses on growing and managing communities like ours.
They have speakers from five tracks: economy, healthcare, civics, media, and arts and culture. Noah Washington, the creator behind "The Ridin' Around Show"—a web show where Washington interviews prominent figures in his town of Fayetteville, Arkansas— says the best part of the conference is the collaboration and hashing out how they can all be better, together.
"I'm in the content world, but they're talking about growing infrastructure. I've been exposed to some things I never would have thought about, and they're bringing a lot of people together who can help each other. They're networking across cities, and I just think it's really cool," Washington said.
It all comes down to conversation and coming together to problem-solve.
"That means talking to people who might disagree with you and engaging in those conversations earnestly, and listening first, right? That was a really powerful message— that progress is really built on relationships. We can come up with as many strategies as we want. We could throw a lot of money at a problem. But at the end of the day, whether the solution we're trying to design actually works is going to depend on how much we trust each other, how much we see the world in a similar way, and whether we're going to try and do it together," Mader said.
