For the past few weeks, CURE has been organizing and putting on events for our local communities. We started off the summer season with our 21st Annual River and History weekend back in May, where more than 60 people on the river on Saturday – many for the first time. We had history talks at night, slept in tents and tipis – got soaked in the morinng rain and then dozens more of us went canoeing and kayaking on Sunday.
CURE entered in to summer with Montevideo’s Fiesta Tri-Festa and River Rendezvous, where medals were awarded to 5K runners and paddle awards were given to triathlon winners. In between the large events, we have had river outings with Immersions with Isak on every Thursday, and celebrations at the K.K. Berge building along the Minnesota River.
The formula for these events is simple, and it goes a little like this: create a fun and welcoming atmosphere with a river setting great music (live and local music preferred), food, lots of it, and beverages of all sorts.
We don’t shy away from courageous
conversations. At our clelbrations we talk about things like the Dakota War of 1862, about dam removal, about tile drainage and about forces that suck and extract the life out of small communities. But we don’t dwell there. We talk about these things one on one, sometimes in groups and invariably it leads to ideas about something we might be able to do together.
We believe in building trust and connecting with people through welcoming, hospitality, engagemement and then serving what emerges from courageous conversations. This is how we build relationships and fuel our work.
CURE loves to capture the fun at these events we host or attend through photographs. At the Fiesta Tri-Festa and River Rendezvous event, more than 500 photos were taken with around 180 of them posted to our Facebook page. As a result of our active engagement with people, we passed the 1,000 friends mark on Facebook. Now that is something to celebrate!
Thank you friends for making celebrating with CURE at our events a fun filled times that lead to meaningful work and positive social change.
Leave a Reply