The Greensboro City Council spent from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Monday, Feb 24 at the ACC Hall of Champions at the Greensboro Coliseum talking about vision statements, mission, statements values and finally goals.
They did take a break for lunch, but mainly they worked on the tasks assigned by strategic consultant Meredith Powell, who did a remarkable job of keeping the mayor and councilmembers on task all day.
Starting out with something as innocuous as mission and vision statements seemed to help councilmembers get focused on the task of writing values and goals.
The council broke into three groups for every task and the groups were: Group 1, Councilmembers Justin Outling, Tammi Thurm and Sharon Hightower; Group 2, Mayor Nancy Vaughan and Councilmembers Marikay Abuzuaiter and Yvonne Johnson; and Group 3, Councilmembers Goldie Wells, Michelle Kennedy and Nancy Hoffmann.
Each group had to write the results of their work on a large poster board sized piece of paper that was then displayed in the front of the room. Wells, without question, has the best handwriting of any councilmember.
City Councilmember Michelle Kennedy pushed for “affordable housing” to be included as a value.
Councilmember Justin Outling questioned whether it was the proper category for affordable housing.
The values that the entire City Council reached consensus on are: Safety, Inclusion, Respect, Innovative and Sustainability.
Thurm said she didn’t like the order, and the order of the values was discussed.
Hightower said, “I like inclusive first.”
Abuzuaiter said, “I’m going to say innovative because if you say innovative then everything else sort of falls in line.”
Vaughan said, “I like inclusive.”
So the newly ordered list which the majority appeared to accept is: Inclusive, Innovative, Respect, Sustainability and Safety.
Each value also had a sentence describing what the word meant in this particular context.
