Roberts & Kay, Inc. -- Lexington Citizen Summit

Lexington Citizen Summit

Spring, 1995 – Spring, 1998

For the community of Lexington, Kentucky, as a civic contribution, we designed and helped produce the Lexington Citizen Summit, an innovative structure for encouraging and supporting community building efforts. The Summit happened annually from 1995 to 1998 and took place using a format called "open space technology." In the first years, the Lexington Citizen Summit served as one of the community's only safe places for frank conversations about race and community needs. Later, the Summit began evolving into a place where people could talk with each other about other subjects as well.

In addition to Steve and Rona, Linda Harvey, Larry Johnson, and Rev. Willis Polk helped found the Summit. We created the Citizen Summit as a response to a particular flashpoint or crisis in the life of the community, involving the accidental killing of a young African American/black man by a police officer. The incident highlighted the ongoing problems that the community has had in dealing with issues of race, and, more generally, of equity. The founders saw the Summit as a way to bring people together using open space technology and to have them identify issues, areas of concerns, and ways to begin working on things in a self-directed way.

The Summit used Open Space Technology, a structured approach that invites participants to spend the first 60-90 minutes of the two-day session building an agenda for group work. Usually people proposed 35-50 sessions; of these proposed sessions, about 20-25 drew participants and took place. Participants proposed and conducted sessions on such diverse topics as increasing minority representation and participation, public transportation, images of African Americans, literacy, teen community centers, and lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgendered youth.

Participants produced quick summary reports from each session, entering them into an on-site computer. After the closing session, during which each person had a chance to speak about the event, participants received a complete set of the group reports, produced together as a rough "proceedings" from the Summit.

Two of the most important legacies of the Citizen Summit are the Humanitarium: A Center for Culture and Diversity, a fledgling effort that will, in time, be one of Lexington's signature institutions, and the Rainbow Reading Conference, which for four years has attracted hundreds of teachers and children and families interested in reading books by authors of color.

Learn more about RKI's work in the area of community change and citizen engagement.

Visit descriptions of other clients for whom we've conducted open space events or developed large group processes.