What is a summit? Why a summit?

I've been suggesting for a couple of years that Westminster College and the Forum ought to host a Sugar House Summit.

What is a summit? A chance for campus and community members to come together for a wide-ranging, creative, unpredictable set of conversations about Sugar House--its culture, needs, assets, future, and past. The benefit of a summit is that it can be a host to all of these things. It can include a keynote speech from a respected community builder, the examination of plans, the airing of grievances, the generation of new ideas. It should include the spoken, the visual, the tactile, the musical. In short it takes all of the practices of a healthy community and compresses them into two intense days.

Why host a summit? Consider a metaphor. Communities are like streams. Streams are home to currents. Some move fast, others slow. Some circle back, or dive under the surface. Some are shallow, others deep. Currents play lots of roles--deep ones allow fish to shelter, shallow ones let insects live. Slow ones let plants take root. But there are points in every stream where the currents come together, compressed by a bend in the stream, or fallen logs, or stones that encroach on the stream bed. These narrower points compress the currents, mix them together, force them to move more quickly. At the other end of the pinch point the stream contains the same water, but it is an entirely different stream.

The summit is a pinch point--a place in the life of a community where the currents rub up against each other and in so doing create something new. And then the community moves on, but with newly arranged currents--new friendships, views, agreements, conflicts all built out of the old.

My hope is that we think of the summit this way, not as a one-time event, or merely a gathering (a pond to extend the metaphor). By thinking of it as a pinch point I hope we'll remember that its process is as important as any plans that come out of it. I expect we will come up with ideas, a toolkit, a vision for the future, a commitment to the past. But I am particularly hopeful that it will be the location where by bringing people together we help to create new leaders, new coalitions, new activities, new businesses.