Ithaca Conference

[liz constable]

I made it to the afternoon sessions and the speaker from MARDOG  was wonderful. She is a REAL dog park advocate and really had some good suggestions. I am so glad I went.

 

I thank Seth and Empar and Leo for putting this together. I was a participant in the E-conference that was going on previous to the actual conference and I learned quite a lot from it, as well.

 

I think it might be a good idea to perhaps invite one or more of these other people who have been successful in their dog park endeavors to come here and discuss their ideas with us. They have definite strategies that worked and I think this is where we may be missing the boat, so to speak.

 

Alison Deeb from MARDOG in New Jersey is the person who really has it together when it comes to presenting the concept to city authorities and also with community outreach. She does consulting for groups who are trying to get dog parks started and I think she may be able to look at our situation and give us some help. 

 

I know that , in many cases, people do get "stuck" and I kind of feel this is what seems to have happened to TCdog.

 

Do we really want a dog park? If so, then we have to do what it takes to get going and get really serious about making our "pitch" more professional. I am saying this from my own experience with the Ithaca Schools....There were cases where we had to hire a consultant to actually mediate staff meetings because the staff was so polarized and not able to make progress.....I kind of feel that we may be in a similar position and it is preventing us from getting our message across.

 

I experienced a lot of frustration just with the directive about whether to go to the Parks Commission meeting or Not to go...there doesn't seem to be a clear message from a clear leader and it is not helping us.

 

There were, at one time in the afternoon, at least 5 of the Board members of TCdog present at the Dog Friendly Communities Conference and I think this was good. They all seemed to have a positive reaction to what they heard, too. I hope we can discuss it further at the next Board meeting and perhaps look at engaging outside help with our effort to move our project along.

 

It was also great that some people actually attended the conference from as far away as California and Colorado and NY City.. There were also attendees from the Ithaca Dog Training Group and others in our community. This tells me that there is interest in making ours a more dog friendly community and we have allies out there. It was a good place to network.  Seth didn't really have much time to advertise this conference but I think, with more of an advance, there would have been a lot more people at this event.

 

I hope to see this lead to a regional or national conference at some later date. I know that Seth and some others are hoping to form a national alliance for per friendly communities (I'm not sure what they plan to call themselves but the focus is to be dog friendliness and a national and international dog owner's organization with some political clout).

 

Liz Constable- TCdog

Ithaca, NY