Town Talks Live believes WE can build community through shared stories, discussions, books, and topics of interest that matter to all. TTL provides regular opportunities for engagement to better represent ourselves and our communities, and, in doing so, find and demand better representation from our elected officials! Town Talks Live has put together a workshop trio to guide us as we work toward strengthening conversations within our communities to protect and enhance our Democracy. Workshops will be offered, focusing on how to have conversations with others in the community and ripple out, policy concerns and actions. This is how Town Halls should be. Let’s build the future we want, by talking about the present we have! Each workshop will have multiple venues, so find the one closest to you, held in District 2. Help spread the word!
Our first workshop, Let’s Talk! A Gathering of Community: How a Town Hall Can Be: A Town Talk Style Town Hall. Let’s re-envision the town hall by learning how to talk to one another! We'll gather and share stories of who we are and why we are choosing to be engaged in Democracy! We'll give a "book tasting" from Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from a Culture of Contempt by Arthur Brooks, as well as visit conversation strategies from Monica Guzman’s book, I Never Thought of it That Way: How to have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. Through our own personal stories, we'll discuss what most concerns us, listen to the concerns of others and practice for future political and policy discussions in our next two workshops! Leave with strategies to help extend these conversations further into our communities, “rippling out” to others with perceived different views. Visit the Events page for September Workshops! Jefferson County and Franklin County coming this October!
Hope. Kindness. Connection.
The second workshop in this series, Let’s Talk Policy! A Town Talk Style Town Hall! will allow us to converse with one another, utilizing techniques from the previous workshop, as we examine specific policy ideas. We’ll look at the data from the most recent World Happiness Study by Gallup. What programs and policies work in other countries that enhance well-being? Where is the U.S. relative to the rest of the world? What do we need in our own communities? We’ll combine this with The NYT ‘s recent bestseller, Abundance, by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, which takes a non-partisan look at what has worked when it comes to reform and what hasn’t. They propose a set of questions, rather than policy recommendations to expand our understanding and thinking, so we can continue the conversations. Each policy workshop will be customoized to focus on a what arose from survey responses from the first series. Housing, Transportation, Energy. Health or Education, for example. To Be Announced Post First Series.
Our third workshop, Let’s Talk: How Do We Save Democracy? A Town Talk Style Town Hall will feature Joyce Vance’s much anticipated book, Giving Up is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy. Many of us are not happy with the current state of our government and believe it needs strong citizen intervention. This book should give us good points of conversation and ways to act. https://sites.prh.com/givingupisunforgivable
Click on Events to sign up! Bringing others into the fold? Have them sign up! Events will post quarterly and will be at a variety of Library Locations throughout District 2, weekdays and one Saturday a month. And, possibly in the evening. Searching for venues!
Fall/Winter Calendar & signups open up August 25th, 2025.
To be scheduled up to Midterms!
January, February & March 2026
April, May & June 2026
August, September & October 2026