“What can a community do when a hate group comes to town and targets a wide variety of organizations, each of which have different ideas of how to respond — or not?

“That’s what happened in Charleston and Wheeling, West Virginia in March 2010. The Westboro Baptist Church hate group announced it would picket Jewish and Catholic institutions, a local university, and, as a last-minute addition designed for maximum emotional anguish, the Montcoal Mine, where a dozen miners had just lost their lives.

“How could the community respond, particularly when some people preferred to keep a low profile, while others wanted to stage a loud counter-protest? Who could even lead such a community response, given the different values of the targeted groups?”

Read the rest of the article from the National Not in Our Town website

Lessons from NIOT:

Be inclusive.

Focus on the positive.

Be as broad based as possible.

Princeton has been targeted before and we pray it won’t happen again — but if we are, here is our potential action plan.