One of the most difficult decisions for the group to make was the location for the workshop series. Eventually, the Council team agreed to a location that was central to all the other teams but meant that the Council team would have to travel nearly 200 miles one way to each workshop. The Priest River team had a similar distance to travel. These two teams seemed to agree to this burden quite willingly and eventually found that the time on the road together had a positive impact on their work together.

Two individuals, Jim Birdsall and Elaine Johnston, served as the organizers and reference points for the Steering Committee. These two have similar leadership styles that involve extensive delegation and coaching relationships with the other group members. It was an elegant solution to the early need for many Steering Committee members to come to a level of understanding about MIRA. While they were learning and getting comfortable with the complexities of the entire project, simple, concrete tasks such as interviewing trainers or working with meeting room set-ups kept involvement high.

Both Birdsall and Johnston kept the group on task with reminders about timelines and decisions via e-mail which was used extensively by the Steering Committee. This proved an advantage but also in some ways dictated membership since those team members without online services did not represent a team on the Steering Committee.

This technique of delegation/reminders and shared leadership style also prevented the entire group from becoming dependent on either of these two individuals. The Steering Committee was also characterized as a group by a high energy level and 1ighthearted approach to their tasks. The MIRA project was certainly taken very seriously, but Steering Committee members seemed to enjoy working together and the workshop events were typically described as a lot of fun.

A strength of the Idaho Steering Committee was in the early establishment of committees and the identification of tasks. Another strength was the communication system they established not only for purposes of accountability but for improving connections, too. As one Steering Committee member mentioned, "I'd never even visited the other five towns and now I have a connection there and know 15 people who live there, It's made a difference on how I look at where I live and how I view the entire state."

Weaknesses within the Steering Committee emerged from the fact that many of the individuals had never met previously. Considerable effort was required to build a team from this group of individuals, and time was never allocated for that purpose. As the project developed, the Steering Committee began to act more like a working group than a collection of strangers, but the time span involved might have been shortened if attention had been paid to team-building. Steering Committee members were unanimous in their appreciation of the opportunity to get to know other communities, however. Many expressed surprise that other, similar communities even existed and were very impressed that similar issues had been identified. "We thought we were pretty much alone," said one team representative, "and it was a surprise to find out others had the same problems."

The Steering Committee learned about workshop planning as the project went along. While logistics were never very problematic because of an excellent facility, improvements were made in the selection of trainers and the technology demonstrations. Subcommittees improved their procedures, communication patterns became solidified and made regular and overall team approach increased.

An excellent example of this developing capacity within the Steering Committee and the teams is the formation and operations of the Grants Committee. The Steering Committee made a purposeful decision not to serve as the Grants Committee and asked each team to select a representative in order to form a new group to review team proposals as suggested in the RFP. The new group was formed during the fourth workshop event and, taking an extended lunch break, created a series of questions for each team to use as a proposal framework and a timeline for the submission of proposals and review and response back to the teams. The framework was simple but efficient. Each team was told to answer the following questions in no more than four pages of text: How would you describe your team project? How did you determine need? How will you accomplish the goals? What's your timeline? How much will it cost? How will you measure success?

None of these members had ever written a grant, read proposals or engaged in this type of activity prior to MIRA. The way they established a proposal process and reviewed and responded to the teams indicates an increased capacity not only for working together, but for communication and decision-making skills as well.