In an earlier Blogenberg I wrote about a unique Word of Mouth Public Relations (WOMPR) effort we are undertaking in Pennsylvania coal country. We’ve finished our analysis of the community. We’ve created the theoretical framework, so to speak, for utilizing WOMPR to support social change. Now we’ve gotten to work.

We’ve just finished the “put it to work” meeting, the meeting where we boil the message down to small bites, identify specific strategies, and lay out a timeline for activities. This WOMPR effort is designed to help a community address far-too-many instances of older male/younger (sometimes much younger) female sexual relations — the objective is to empower parents to help youth make healthier, safer decisions. So, for example, one strategy we have developed is the use of “ambassador parents.” But deciding how many “ambassador parents,” how they will be recruited, what they will do and say, how we will support them, what feedback mechanisms we will use, etc. is hard work. Indeed, the entire “put it to work” meeting is hard, hard work.

If you’re engaged in a WOMPR effort and you are facilitating that “put it to work” meeting and you are not mentally exhausted at the end, you’re either not getting anything done that will make a real difference or you’re just much better at it than me.

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Jose Brooks is Blogenberg’s father-in-law. He passed on Saturday. He was a man’s man. Not in the hackneyed American way. I mean in an old-world European fashion. He was French, an important business and government figure in his home. Measured by inches or centimeters, he was much shorter than I. But I always felt smaller than he — standing next to him, looking down I always felt I was looking up. At times, sometimes in frustration with me, my wife says that I remind her of her father. Blogenberg will always be beyond flattered by such a comparison.