By Carol Stiffler
At Saturday’s free community pasty dinner – featuring Mrs. Darlene Hobbs’ famous pasties – Paradise residents and guests will be asked to consider sharing their impressions of the community and their hopes and concerns for its future.
The pasty dinner will be held from 5 – 7 p.m. at the Whitefish Township Community Center. Everyone with any connection to Paradise is welcome to attend. When they arrive, they’ll receive a list of questions aimed at discovering what they think and feel about Paradise.
The questions are the next step in a massive project taken on by more than 50 Paradise volunteers called the Paradise Area Community Heart & Soul project. It’s an expressly non-governmental undertaking by design.
With $10,000 in local funding and a matching $10,000 grant from the Heart and Soul Foundation, the volunteers began work in 2025. They built a large committee intent on interviewing as many people with connections to Paradise as possible – perhaps even 1,000 people, said Kerry Laycock, who is handling communications for the project.
“This is a huge undertaking for our little community,” Laycock said. “It is also a unique approach to community engagement.”
The questions they’re asking are:
What brought you to our community, and why do you stay (or return)?
What matters most to you about living, visiting, or working here?
What do you love most about the Paradise area? What’s your favorite place here? What makes that place special?
What would you miss the most if it was no longer here?
What would make living, working, or visiting here easier?
What do you hope to see, feel, or experience here five years from now?
What concerns do you have about the future of our community?
What do you want your family and friends to experience here?
How do you get your information about what is going on locally?
To gather these thoughts, the group has a team of “story gatherers” who record interviews with people. Though the interviewer knows who they are interviewing, their responses are kept anonymous. Interviewers are instructed not to write the person’s name anywhere in the notes at all, and that interview is assigned a number. This method intends to encourage people to be honest without fear of judgment or retribution.
Those interviews are then heard by a group of three “story listeners”, who discuss what the person said and break it down item by item. These pieces get logged in a database, where familiar terms are grouped together.
At June’s Community Heart and Soul meeting, the group said they’d listened to 19 interviews, and repeat concerns include handling blight in the area. Public trails have been mentioned. One person said they’d love to have a Burger King in town.
Many more interviews are yet to be conducted and heard, and the volunteer group expects the project to take a couple years total to complete. At the end of the story gathering and listening, the group will create an action plan and implement feasible, popular modifications.
