For the Iowa Cluster, MIRA was an impetus to jump-start latent community capacity. In a sense, the "capacity" was there, but it wasn't being utilized.
During evaluation interviews, the most often-mentioned element of capacity building was people power. Every team reported that MIRA had broadened the base of volunteers within the community. New people, and especially younger people, were becoming interested in doing something for the town. As in so many volunteer situations, the same pool of community leaders usually had emerged to take on every challenge. But MIRA not only encouraged new people to join in the effort, it also encouraged established leaders to look beyond themselves for help and support. Because the subject-information technology-was unfamiliar, and to some mysterious, established leaders actively recruited "non-traditional" volunteers from the community at large. To complete various group assignments, some of these new leaders were assuming responsibilities they had never taken on, thus building on their own individual capacities.
It is interesting that the younger the team member, the more positive the reaction toward the workshop sessions. Asset mapping and project planning sessions were often mentioned by young team members as personally helpful. In Lenox, community leaders used a problem solving exercise they had practiced during a MIRA workshop when they met to discuss a growing graffiti problem within their small town of 1,300 people.
The availability of information technology is another latent capacity in southwest Iowa. One team member conceded that southwestern Iowa has the existing technology, but too few communities are fully utilizing the resource. Another member said that, for example, the Iowa Communications Network exists, but many communities, such as Carlisle, fail to take advantage of it. In fact, some Iowa legislators were considering selling it to private interests. Greenfield members remarked that the issue is made even more complex because Iowa has 151 telephone companies; New Jersey has only one. At the second workshop the facilitator asked the audience how many team members had access to the Internet. Nearly everyone raised their hands. In fact, each community has Internet access, yet before the MIRA program, only a handful had addressed information technology as a community-wide issue and resource.
MIRA has successfully raised the issue of "managing information with rural America" within the Iowa Cluster. The groups of people who have come together to explore the changes that information technology is not only offering, but indeed, forcing, are serious in their intent to make technology work for them instead of against them.
Presently, however, Iowa communities are still locked in the paradigm of "every community for itself." This was evident throughout the evaluation process. Outside of e-mail from Steering Committee to Project Teams, communication flowed within teams, but not between teams. There seemed to be little sharing of goals and objectives until the actual Grants Committee met to establish guidelines and review proposals. Even the individual towns in Warren County that combined to make up single teams chose to work on separate projects within their respective communities.
Hopefully, this continuing fragmentation will decrease as more leaders recognize the need for rural communities to collaborate as well as compete. As one Lenox team member said, "Southwest Iowa has to begin seeing itself as one big community. We're all connected. I'm 20 minutes from a movie theater in Corning and 10 minutes from a video store in another town. It's not that different from people who live in a big city. But we've got to start thinking and working together like a single community."
