Last Updated on July 17, 2025
Forward Party at Charlestown
Leader, RoseAnn Wade
The MD Forward Party is a grassroots organization working to create communication between current extreme political points of view. We hope to have our group here at Charlestown become a vehicle through which residents can work together to find a middle ground.
| SCHEDULE | TIME | LOCATION |
| 1st Friday | 7 – 8:30 PM | Pickleball Court (former Refectory) |
MD Forward at Charlestown Meeting Minutes May 2025
MD FWD at Charlestown Meeting Minutes May 2, 2025
PEP DEBATE
On Friday, 05/02 the Charlestown Forward Club met to experience a PEP (Prioritizing Epic Problems) debate. Though eventually we hope to use PEP to bring residents with divergent political viewpoints to a better understanding of one another’s feelings, this time we decided to debate a more innocuous topic just to learn about the PEP debating format.
Four panelists, Pat Kasuda, Bob Jenner, Wayne Smith and Ralph Wade presented statements declaring their concerns about the loss of general seating dining (á la Refectory) and the subsequent reduction of opportunities for community residents to interact with new residents.
Pete Oliver-Krueger, Matt Beyers and Adam Wise from the Maryland Forward Board attended, Matt and Pete led the debate.
The premise of PEP is that most of us can agree on a problem, but we tend to argue about what might be the best solution. We worked on a more specific definition to the problem that all panel members could agree was accurate though they had originally approached the issue from varying points of view. This being an unfamiliar debate format, it took us a bit to get used to how we were going to generate a specific definition of our problem without trying to spend time discussing solutions. Once hammered out, panelists ranked which definition best stated the problem until they all agreed on the #1 best problem description (see slide #8). See attached slide deck pdf for explanation of purpose and format used and results of the discussion.
We ran out of time before we completed the discussion about possible solutions to problem #1.
COMING UP: BRAINSTORMING OUTREACH AND ENGAGEMENT
MD FWD’s main goal this year is to familiarize MD voters with the existence of our organization and its goals. To this end, at our next meeting on Friday June 6, we will break into small groups to brainstorm how the Charlestown club can introduce FWD to people in our community and beyond. See Ideas for Outreach and Engagement for a few suggestions that PJ gave us. I have a feeling we can initiate quite a few ideas. Once all our ideas are compiled, we will take a stab at using Rank Choice Voting to choose which we think will be best for us to accomplish this year and set ourselves some goals and deadlines.