I’m in an incredibly blessed place.
For about the last three years, I’ve been delving deeper into the subject of community: what it is, how it’s formed, how to sustain it, and why it’s so rare in this culture. I tried to form community through charity and nonprofit formation at my old church, which largely failed. I joined with a small but intrepid group of de-churched Jesus-lovers to make a community here on the Bluff. That’s still growing. I studied neighborhood leadership at the Wilder Center for Communities, and its history at Minnesota History Center. I read loads of books on the psychology of community. And I fell in love with asset-mapping at an Asset-Based Community Development Institute retreat in Chicago.
So what the heck is asset mapping? It’s what I’ve been doing on my own for over a year now. I’ve been systematically listing all the assets–all the good things–our neighborhood has. Its places. Its associations. Its institutions. Its churches. And most daunting but important, the gifts of its people.
And lo, in the middle of my scattered slips of paper and to-do lists and Google maps, I was offered a job. Do your dream in 12 hours a week with the Dayton’s Bluff Community Council. Recruit a staff of researchers from underrepresented populations in the neighborhood. Train them. Listen to the community you love.
I keep gratefully asking myself, “Who gets to create their own dream job?”
I also keep following up with the question, “What if you fail at your dream job?”
How on earth does one break through decades of institutional racism and cultural isolation and Eastside melancholy to build hope again? Everyone around me says they “love the diversity” of this community, but then why is most everyone around me Caucasian, despite my efforts to broaden my network of friends and acquaintances?
So I keep contacting nonprofits and churches and friends and clubs, asking for references: Whom do you know in the community that loves this community and wants to see it grow? I get silence and gracious referrals and suggestions of where else to look. And I go deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.
A Thread of Connection 