MOSES LAKE — The Moses Lake Community Coalition will try to kick-start some conversations Thursday at a town hall titled “What's Troubling You, Moses Lake?”

“The feedback that we've gotten for all of our prior town halls is people enjoyed them, but they wish there was more of an opportunity to talk,” said Coalition Coordinator Megan Watson. “So we (said), ‘Let's create a town hall event where that's the point – where you come and talk in small groups.’”

The coalition holds town hall meetings every year, Watson said, and in the past they’ve focused on specific issues, like gangs or addiction, with local experts on those subjects giving information to the community. This time, Watson said, the MLCC is partnering with Braver Angels, a national organization dedicated to helping Americans practice courageous citizenship across political differences, according to its website. The event, which will take place at the Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center, is free and open to the public.

Civic discourse often devolves into political argument, Watson said, and that’s what the MLCC and Braver Angels hope to avoid.

“For our topic choices, we tried to boil it down … to the root of what some of those issues might be,” Watson said. One of the topics of conversation is, why are hard conversations so hard? A lot of times the root of the disagreement is just communication. We've got a topic about generations: what do generations get wrong about each other? We're seeing a lot of intergenerational vitriol for one another, so (we want) to come to an understanding about where we’re each coming from.”

Staff from the Columbia Basin Dispute Resolution Center will be at the event to serve as facilitators for the small discussion groups, Watson said. The goal is to foster community cohesion, she said.

“Sure, we have all these issues and all these things going on, but sometimes it feels difficult to get to the solutions because there's so much of a divide with people working together because they're coming from what feels like opposing viewpoints,” she said. “Our view of it is that there's a lot of shared values within this community; it's just hard to recognize that if there's too much contention involved. So we wanted to provide an opportunity to get past some of that and focus on what we have in common, our shared values, and see if we can move some things forward from there.”

‘What’s Troubling You, Moses Lake?’

6:30 p.m. June 25

Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center

900 Yonezawa Blvd., Moses Lake

www.mlcommunitycoalition.com