BROKEN BOW – After this summer, nobody can accuse Broken Bow’s youth of civic apathy.
The 3rd through 5th graders in Megan Crawford’s Super Kids Club spent most of the month of July scouring local news articles, stacks of minutes from municipal boards, and talking with family members about the challenges facing the community of Broken Bow, and possible solutions to overcome them by 2043.
The project was part of a pilot program furnished by Lincoln-based Beyond School Bells, which provided curriculum and other materials at no cost to the club.
Crawford, director of the Super Kids Club, says the seed of the visions started with questions that only seem simple on the surface.
“We started with talking about: ‘what do you see, what do you want? If you were living here in 20 years, what do want to be here?’”
The kids would enthusiastically name restaurants, retail, and recreational possibilities with no hesitation, but Crawford would encourage her group to dig a little deeper.
“They would say things like, ‘We want a Taco Bell!’ And I’d say, ‘Ok, where are you going to build it?’”
Crawford says after a month of researching, brainstorming, and puzzling out where and how to push a little concrete into their clouds, her kids came to an astute conclusion without any assistance.
“They chose housing as their top challenge. They said, ‘In order to get more employees and to help out industry and hospitality, you have to be able to house them.’”
The conclusion is all the more remarkable considering that on any given day, the group of kids might be entirely different that the day before.
Crawford’s kids recognized other major thorns in Broken Bow’s side: childcare, cost of living, and hospitality, issues that have been the focus of a great many council talks, supervisors’ discussions, and even a library forum.
The Super Kids Club director says that after presenting at a city council meeting that was housing-focused, she rushed to inform her group the next day that they were really onto something.
“I told them how they’re recognizing the issues that adults, professionals and work in those fields, are working on. And they’re coming up with solutions that are similar if not identical to the ones proposed by those adults.”
While it was one thing to identify the community’s problems and solutions, another entirely is presenting such complex ideas in an easy-to-digest way. Crawford’s kids’ problem-solving skills would come in handy once more: the group constructed a 15-building cardboard “town,” with each building representing a different facet of Broken Bow’s social, civic, and economic landscape.
Crawford says that the visualization helped her kids identify not only opportunities for growth for the city in 20 years but important pieces that should remain unchanged.
“We talked about which businesses we’d want to stay open in 2043. Someone would say, ‘I want to see BD because my mom works there,’ or, ‘I want to see Adams Land & Cattle because both of my parents work there.’ We made sure to have conversations about how to support the current businesses while also supporting new businesses.”
The Super Kids Club director fully intends to offer the program next year, with the hope of incorporating a video element; as kids graduate out of the club, or enter it as they start 3rd grade, the question for all ages remains: what will Broken Bow look like in 2044?
