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 Fellow Regional Stewards,
If you weren't in Salt Lake City for the National Forum on Regional Stewardship, you missed an exciting and stimulating event which is described later in this e-newsletter. As incoming Chair George Vradenburg commented, Four years ago people came to the forums with lots of ideas, now they are coming with lessons learned from actually practicing regional stewardship. If you are an Organizational or Individual Steward you will soon be receiving a CD-Rom with all the conference presentations.
You will see numerous changes from ARS over the upcoming months. The Board of Directors' decision earlier this year to have us focus on you, the practitioners of regional stewardship, has led us to develop new services and programs. Prime among these is RegionLink (www.regionlink.org), a new interactive service to link practitioners to each other to share best practices, lessons learned and find out about the latest development in regional initiatives around the country. Every few days we are posting articles of interest from newspapers around the country. We will be continually adding services and certain parts will only be available to individual and organizational stewards. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Murray and Agnes Good Government Foundation provided grants to support the development of this new service.
In response to the growing interest in region-to-region visits, ARS has developed RSVP - the Regional Stewardship Visitors Program. Through this service, ARS will arrange region-to-region visits for interested groups, designed to meet the needs and interests of the visiting region. We will work with both the visitors and visitees to schedule a visit which will, among other things, offer the visitors a chance to explore regional initiatives that may be pertinent to their own region.
We have also finalized the dates for the 2005 National Forums. The Spring National Forum will take place in Washington, D.C., May 4-6, the Fall Forum will be held in Louisville, Kentucky November 9-11. We hope you will mark your calendars now and join us for these exciting events.
ARS is focused on making healthy and vibrant regions by promoting stewardship that creates innovative economies, makes communities livable, promotes social inclusion, and practices collaborative governance. But more importantly, we want to help you - regional stewards - achieve tangible results and realize sustainable outcomes in your region-and across the country. Please do not hesitate to call on us at any time - we look forward to working with you.
Sincerely,
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