‘Food for Thought’ to begin meeting monthly in RO

A new program will be held monthly to share new ideas and establish local connections.
Montgomery County Memorial Hospital at 2301 Eastern Ave. will host “Food 4 Thought,” in the Don Carter room, the former Red Oak Pharmacy building. The program will take place on every second Thursday from noon to 1 p.m.
The program was started by Larry Brandstetter, who said he’s been looking to do a program like this for quite some time.
“For many years, I’ve kind of had an idea to have a brown bag lunch program where people can come over their noon hour, and hear an interesting speaker talk about local or southwest Iowa issues. My initial plan was to host it at the Wilson Performing Arts Center, but I never was able to get it moving at the Wilson because we couldn’t have food, though that has changed,” Brandstetter said. “However, I was recently talking to my good friend, Ron Kloewer, who is the MCMH CEO and expressing my thoughts about this to him, and he thought that the hospital might want to get involved in this. After some additional chat with he and Chris Hughes, we put this thing together. People can come prior to noon, pick up some lunch in the cafeteria, eat it there, or bring it to the room, or they can bring their own lunch to eat.”
The first session will focus on how to leverage AI for home, work, and school. For the first quarter of the program, they will have an AI focus.
“Chris said that people are very interested in AI, and so is he, and he’s been using it. The first four monthly sessions, October, November, December, and January, he’s going to talk about AI and how it can be used and abused. And then he’s going to have a session there from 7 to 9 on those Thursday evenings where people can bring their laptops and actually learn firsthand how to use AI, so after the noon luncheon program, they’ll get a more in-depth dive into the subject if they come back from 7 to 9 p.m.,” commented Brandstetter.
Following the four AI sessions, Brandstetter said he will be doing the continual programming of these additional forums.
“I’ve put together a list of categories that I’m going to be filling with programming. It will include everything from business and manufacturing in southwest Iowa and how strong is it and what’s being done to improve it, to education. For a lot of these programs, I hope to have more than one speaker, and the speakers will come from all over southwest Iowa, not just Red Oak, to talk about it. Other topics include care and prevention in the healthcare sector and technology advances, agriculture, public safety and judicial structuring, city and county government, as well as marketing and promoting southwest Iowa and Montgomery County housing. Those are some of the issues that I hope to get into,” Brandstetter stated.
The program will allow for the speaker to have around half an hour to lay out what they want to talk about, then in the last half hour, the program will allow for a Q&A from the audience back and forth so that they can get a better understanding of it.
“If they have other opinions, other thoughts that they might want to express, that’s their option as well, but we will end absolutely at 1 o’clock, whether I have to cut people off or not, because we need to get people back to work. By doing so, I think that we’re going to have an interesting forum for people to learn and to provide their feedback.”
Brandstetter made it clear that the program will be for everybody, and is not for just the business people, those who work in city government, or from the medical field.
“I imagine that we’ll start off with just a few people, but our belief is that it’s going to grow. Even though this is sponsored by the Red Oak Chamber of Industry Association,  the hospital, Chris’s company, and others, this is for everybody in the county in southwest Iowa, not just Red Oak. There are going to be times when we’ll be talking about issues that affect every town in our county, not just ours, and we’d like people from all over southwest Iowa to say, hey, let me go and hear what this is all about,” Brandstetter explained.
For more information, you can call Brandstetter at 623-4053.