MANSFIELD — Tonight is a great night to come do journalism with us at Richland Source.
It’s your chance to meet the eight men and women who want to lead Mansfield into the near future.
We will host “Meet the Candidates” at Idea Works, starting at 6 p.m., the only time during the campaign that all eight City Council candidates will be in the same room.
It’s not a debate. No hard time limits. It will be an informal and civil conversation about the city and its future.
You can register for the free event here. We are blessed this season to have our friends at the Solutions Journalism Network helping to fund our entire effort.
The evening will be the next step in our “Citizens Agenda” approach to local politics and government. We spent the last six weeks on a “Talk the Vote” listening tour, meeting with residents in all areas of the city.
We took notes during those meaningful conversations, listening carefully to the questions and topics you raised. All of the candidates attended at least one of those sessions, though their job was simply to listen, not talk.
We used those community conversations as the backbone of the preview stories we published in the last four days. Some of the key issues you raised during “Talk the Vote” were posed to candidates:
You can read those in-depth stories here:
Burns, Koehler competing for Mansfield City Council’s 1st Ward seat
Akuchie, Van Harlingen competing for Mansfield City Council’s 3rd Ward
Diaz, Lawrence competing for Mansfield City Council’s 5th Ward seat
Dunn, Zader competing for Mansfield City Council At-large seat
Tonight, we flip the switch. It’s the candidates’ turn to talk and your turn to listen and gain the information needed to cast your vote Nov. 2.
We will meet in front of you with the two candidates in each race, spending about 20 minutes in conversation with each pair.
We will not be taking questions from the audience tonight, but the questions we ask will be based on the six “Talk the Vote” sessions.
But tonight is far the end of journey. We will prepare and publish a “Citizens Agenda” based on your questions and comments that we will hand-deliver to Mansfield City Council when it convenes for the first time in January.
We will then take those topics and prepare a series of Solutions Journalism stories in 2022, looking at communities of comparable size and finding out how they have successfully tackled many of the same issues Mansfield is now facing.
The common denominator in all of this is — you.
Your questions. Your concerns. Your voices. And on Nov. 2, your votes.
Our journey together continues tonight at Idea Works at 40 W. 4th St.
Join us tonight. Continue to do journalism with us.
