Morikawa and the project director for the MIRA program, Holly Lesko, met with me in a coffee shop across the street from BEV offices. Rumored to be Morikawa's main office, it was a relaxing place for locals to drop in and meet and make contact in a way that might not be possible in a more formal setting. Both of these leaders had long been familiar with the electronic tools that others were introduced to in the MIRA training. They also seemed comfortable dealing with both foundations and the outlying grass roots groups and individuals who lived far from the high-tech ambiance of Blacksburg. They found the MIRA training to be very poor and said they, along with local talent could have done as well or better. In his final report to the foundation Morikawa noted, "Teams...might have been better suited to define their own training agenda. ...The heavy use of outside experts simply reinforces the notion that our community lacks the capacity to help itself. We must gain confidence in ourselves. ...We need to develop our own pool of consultants, trainers, and facilitators." The one exception was the digital storytelling workshop which Morikawa said had a profound impact on him. He understood how the technology could be used for creative purposes. His own digital story was a personal reflection about his identity as a Japanese-American. After the MIRA project was complete, he secured $10,000 from the Coalition of Community Foundations for Youth to sponsor a digital bootcamp for thirty high school students in the fall of 2000, and they purchased the requisite Adobe software to create their own stories, once the camp was over.

Morikawa's final report to Kellogg is one of the more eloquent that I read. It conveyed, far more than my own visit revealed, the course of the project and what expected and surprising results there were. He stressed that all the groups were in this together. Ten groups formed, and ten group qualified. "In a grassroots, collaborative undertaking, everyone has to make it. If any of the teams had dropped out or, worse, had been dropped, we couldn't have succeeded. To do so would have been divisive." This attitude is in sharp contrast to every other state cluster where some groups came to the application process in a sort of marriage of convenience and others only bonded together during the last celebration in Michigan in the summer of 2000. Other groups felt the length of the project was far too long; People in Virginia thought it was too short. They found the training a good place to socialize, but in some other states there was no time for schmoozing because they were driving far longer most of the Virginians did.