Organizing Communities: Accomplishing Goals

This past weekend I traveled to the Berkshires and did a bit of camping with my wife for our first anniversary. We visited a local tourism welcome center and found some pamphlets of things to do in the region. One stuck out as not only a fun activity that we participated in, but something that I connected, for me, with this class.  We ended up riding the 22 miles (roundtrip) of the Ashuwillticook Rail Trail, but the really interesting part of this is the way this public activity space is utilized and how it came about:

Seeing the potential for recreational use of the corridor, citizens organized to preserve the right-of-way, eventually gaining the local and political support needed to make this rail trail a reality. 

Now as the work you've all done so far attests, developing and creating publics is a bit of a challenge. How do we get people to care about various issues when they are already so busy, and how do we keep them involved with issue once they've committed some level of support (especially with other competing issues that are also valuable?). To me, this sentence in the history section of the webpage seems to gloss over what was probably a significant amount of hard work that was performed by a group of hardworking community members. What could we learn about public writing if we knew more about how this specific group "gain[ed] the local and political support needed".... 

For this week's blog (due by Saturday at 10pm) respond to the following prompt. Go out and find an example of something that was accomplished by public writing in your community or a community that you are familiar with. Describe in a paragraph what it is a group accomplished. Then, try to find someone who knows some of the history about how that change or that project became a reality through public writing and activism? Ask them to share what they know about the challenges and successes the group encountered? Then, in 2-3 paragraphs describe what you learned about the difficulties real public writers face when trying to make an idea a reality--like the 22 miles of activism I rode on July 4th!