A moderate-sized crowd of close to 100 people attended the panel discussion at the Greene Room Events Center of Wild Rose in Jefferson with Nueva Vida en Greene County Tuesday night.

Attendees heard from six panelists from Storm Lake about how their community became a very diverse community over the past 30 years. The speakers included the former police chief, the current Storm Lake Schools superintendent, two current high school students, and a former Storm Lake city council member and the first Latina-elected woman to the council, and her husband. 

One of the moderators, Carlos Aurgello with Latino IQ said the three goals for their initiative to attract the Latino population to Greene County included helping area employers to fulfill available jobs, seeing business and economic development growth, and reversing the declining population trend of the county.

Retired Police Chief Mark Prosser said they had to re-train their department and strategize doing countless number of relationship building programs and practices by outreaching to the neighborhoods and any inappropriate language or racial jokes wouldn’t be tolerated. He said the population of Storm Lake grew from 8,900 in 1989 to 14,000 today. Storm Lakes Schools Superintendent Dr. Stacey Cole said their largest student population is Latino at 52-percent, followed by Asian and then Caucasian, and they have 23 different languages.

Challenges that were discussed mainly consisted of overcoming the language barrier, educating the public to prepare for the influx of diverse people and cultures, along with housing and transportation. 

Aurgello shared his thoughts about how the night went.

“It was a great opportunity to really transition from what we talked about at the town hall meetings and really give the community of Greene County a new perspective with a panel of people who have gone through this journey and have lessons learned that we can take from that we can use to be more efficient and also avoid to go around certain road blocks.”   

The other moderator, Chuck Offenburger, who is also the steering committee chair of Neuva Vida en Greene County described what inspired him the most from the panel discussion.

“And I think, in this project here, as big and as much of a challenge it’s going to be, I think people are seeing we have the opportunity to turn around our population decline and really grow in a way that we’re going to be a great place to live for our children and grandchildren and that they’re going to be prepared for the multi-cultural world that’s our there.”

The final portion of the evening allowed attendees to ask questions of the panel to gain better knowledge of Storm Lakes’ successes and failures. This was the next step following a sleuth of town hall meetings that were held this past spring. Offenburger noted the presentation will be made available to the public soon so those who couldn’t be there can watch.