In part 1 of this series we shared the final report from Ball State about Rush County’s readiness for change and a summary of background data about the challenges our community is facing.

Last fall we held a series of eight Community Insights Meetings to learn what YOU think about your community and our county. We visited New Salem, Glenwood, Mays, Carthage, Manila, Milroy and Rushville in conjunction with Ball State University’s Indiana Communities Institute.

We asked participants to answer five questions:

• What one word/image comes to mind?
• What would be a game changer?
• What do you like about your community?
• What do you love about your community?
• What would you like to love about your community?

Here are their answers.

“Postcards From the Future”

In most of the sessions, participants were encouraged to share their vision for their community by writing a “postcard from the future”. Residents were asked to pretend they had just returned home after being gone for 25 years. They wrote a postcard to a real person describing what they saw and experienced (or did not see or experience) during the visit.

They were mostly hopeful. We’ll share the postcards using #RushCountyPostcards.

What would you say? Send your thoughts along to us, and we’ll create a postcard for you and email it back to you!

Part 3 of this series takes a deeper dive into the online survey and the responses we received.