Bovill, ID

You may have noticed her walking around town, peering into old buildings, and poking at shrubbery….She’s Bovill’s graduate student summer intern from the University of Idaho! Angie is a student in Bioregional Planning and also has a degree in landscape architecture. After gathering background information and meeting and talking to Bovill residents in the past few weeks, Angie has come up with many ideas for improving Bovill, which she presented at the Bovill Horizons graduation celebration on June 21st at the community center. She surveyed community members to determine what the community would like to see accomplished and which items should take priority. So far, it looks like there is a lot of interest in seeing better signage for the community and in renovating the old corner gas station into some sort of a cooperative business/community space for coffee and groceries.

Angie is also investigating the Rails to Trails program and has been networking with various regional resource providers to determine the best way to make things happen.

This internship opportunity came about because the Bovill Horizons Community Pride group saw a need and made a request to the University of Idaho Extension for a student intern.

At the Rural Schools Trust conference in Alabama this spring, Sabrina Myers and Erin Stevenson worked with rural community folks from all over the country to form the Rural Schools in Challenging Circumstances group to continue the work begun at the conference and to provide support and networking. Sabrina and Erin also helped form a subcommittee of that group, the Student Success Committee. Sabrina is chairing this subcommittee and its goal is to define what success is in rural communities (it is not necessarily the same as in urban schools) and to determine what is needed to see that success occur. The committee is made up of rural community representatives from different states, including North Carolina, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Washington D.C.

Erin and Sabrina reported what they learned to the Horizons steering committee. This conference was a great opportunity for Bovill - Let’s support Sabrina and Erin in the their continuing efforts!

Karen Eggers and the Community Pride action team came up with a great approach to community action: in their meetings, they each “pick a part” to play in the actions they want to accomplish rather than “picking apart” each other and the community.

This is a wonderful way to reinforce the importance and power of cooperative teamwork! And this also reminds us of the power of positive thinking and constructive work.

Bovill Horizons has been working to get a cell tower in Bovill.We don’t know if this will happen but we are keeping our fingers crossed. One of our State Representatives is working with us toward this goal. He has already helped Upriver and Emida get an agreement to have towers installed and has graciously agreed to help us as well. Stay tuned.

-Shirley

The northen Idaho Horizons communities met in Worley on Wednsday January 23rd for the Idaho Horizons Summit to bring communities and partners togeather.
Members from the Bovill community to attend were Erin Stevenson, Sabrina Meyer, Cynthia Stevenson, Jessica Reed and Shirley Easterday.
Cynthia Stevenson and Jessica Reed did an excellent job of presenting Bovill’s progress report.
The potental partnering groups to attend were:
Hingston Roach Group
Fuels For School
Idaho Department of Commerce
Idaho Rural Partnership
U.of I.
Avista
Community Action Partnership
Idaho Transportation Department
Idaho Heritage Trust
U.S.D.A. Rural Development Center
Palouse Clearwater Environmental Institue
Velocity Inc.
Rural School and Community Trust

Here are some of the ways we are encouraging connections and communications in Bovill.

Our new Bovill Newsletter is a great success-It took structural change to set it in place and it takes action to keep it going.
if people know whats going on they may be more apt to get involved and ask questions. This enables connections in our community. We’ve purchased postal coverage with Horizons money to keep this and other efforts going.

We see more flyers around town now-it’s good to see what events and resources are available!

We want to do better at supporting our elected officials, giving our “two cents”, and becoming part of the democratic process.
How do we make that a part of Horizons? Our idea is to have at least two steering committee members go to meetings and represent Horizons and find out whats going on.

We need more networking within Bovill and to get our arrows all going in the same direction. We want to gain a wider representation of the community in Bovill horizons. We plan to encourage more church members to come to steering committee meetings. We plan to invite the school principal to meetings. There’s a group that does Santa gifts every year, but they’ve had dwindling volunteers, so we could invite them to Bovill Horizons.

The Community Pride action team hopes in the next 2-3 years to create some beautiful areas in town, places where people can enjoy trees and flowers and sit and relax on community benches. Next summer they hope to partner with the city to do some planting and landscaping along new sidewalks. They have worked with BIG (The nonprofit Bovill Improvement Group) about planting trees. The Community Pride team acquired permission from landowners and from the city (they discussed it with mayor) for improvements. We want people to take pride in our town by creating a more beautiful Bovill. We want people to see and show others what we can accomplish!

Gary and Karen Eggers, Georgia Hunter, and Paula Winter
Fall 2007

Karen and Gary Eggers, Georgia Hunter, and Tara Jones
Fall 2007