The November session for LGM 25 had us starting our day at the Madison Club. It was our last full session for our class and it proved to be one of my favorite sessions.

The presentation by Kwasi Obeng was insightful. Kwasi spoke about his position with the City of Madison and how he interacted with the Alders. He spoke about what is means to be an Alder as well. From this session and from the ones earlier this year, I see how important it is to be an Alder, but with it comes a large commitment of time. It is still something that I would consider in the future though.

We then moved on to the “World Café” portion of the session. In this, we mixed into different groups to discuss what LGM means to us, what we have taken away from LGM, and how might LGM be different in the future. It was nice to interact with everyone again. It had been a while since I felt like the class did this in the class setting (not a social setting). In general, the group had many positive takeaways. What was nice to see, was that there was not a consensus favorite or non-favorite. LGM 25 is made up of people from many different backgrounds, and as such, many different takes on life.

The lunch portion of the session was by far may favorite lunch all year. The lunch guest that I met was Tom Linfield from the Madison Community Foundation. Tom goes way back to the beginnings of LGM (back when the first session was a 2 day retreat!) and has pursued his passion of Community service and giving since. It was very nice to have that time, with someone is a civic leader in the Madison area. To hear where they started from and the journey to where they are today was cool. It would be great is something like that could be done more frequently during LGM sessions in the future.

Finally, we ended our day at the Overture Center. We had a panel discussion that talked about Community Building Through Arts and Culture. The panelists, like most sessions, were excellent. They spoke not only about what the Arts mean to our Community, but also how they are affecting Madison with future plans. Once again, it was a thought provoking discussion in a subject that I do not live in daily. We followed with a tour of Overture that was fun as well.

The LGM experience for me has been a great one. I have now had exposure and an opportunity to interact with Community leaders from all walks of life. I have had the opportunity to learn about issues in the greater Madison area that I knew little about prior to this class. Going forward, I will now stay more tuned into the issues that are present in our Community, and I feel prepared to do my part in helping to work through them to a resolution.