Letter to the Editor: Support for Susan Hairston, Councilwoman-at-Large

I write to convey my support for Susan Hairston, Councilwoman-at-large. It is vitally important for people to understand the role of Councilperson-at-large. While elected collegial members of Common Council will represent Ward I and Ward II and fulfill a responsibility to represent the interests of their Wards, the Councilperson at-large has a different role.

That role is to transcend Ward-specific perspectives and elevate the discussion to examine the impacts on the whole community to ensure that we can be "whole" as one community. There will in fact be times when one Ward will feel a "deficit" by a judgment of Council and another Ward will want to exclaim "thankfully, not in my backyard". The Common Council at-large position is meant to equalize the economic and social impacts so that the community as a whole is best served by a decision.  

This is where Susan Hairston shines brightly. Susan can take in massive amounts of information, understand all sides and then cut to the core to reach the key insight of the topic at hand. She especially showed this when we worked together on the Youth Center initiative in 2009-2010. I can remember interviewing her about the youth services offered in Summit, the locations where our youth were served and the times when services were available to them. In one conversation, she took in all the "moving parts" of the analysis and charged me (at that time, the facilitator of the analysis) to "Do no harm to what all our children receive in terms of value."

I reiterated that sentence in my head over and over and over, until I finally cracked the code of what led to an important conclusion about the Youth Center Initiative. While there were many interpretations of the data and analysis – predictably to protect the proverbial backyard – in the end, the collective team yielded a differentiation between a program and a location. We found ourselves able to protect a program and a collective set of youth services and be open-minded about where they could be delivered.

Several of the program-providing agencies: The Summit Community Center, The Connection For Women and Families, The YMCA, The Summit Public Schools, The Youth Center, The Summit Free Public Library, the PEP Program, and other Summit providers are all serving our youth Monday through Sunday for the lion's share of the day.

While there is more work to be done to wrap more offerings around the needs of the youth, the notions of value and protection were bedrock guiding principles from Susan to the project team. She let us do our work; she made her point; her point led to a significant improvement in service offerings and locations.

Value and protection, I dare say, cut to the core of most topics on our community's agenda: our public school system, downtown businesses, parking, the transit community development, property values and mix of housing stock, municipal services, and others.

If you do not know Susan Hairston, please contact her at susanforsummit@gmail.com.

Annette Dwyer

Resident and community volunteer