Maddening, Indeed.

I didn’t want to get too personal. But this is the first of many blogs I’ll probably write about the interface between the self and community. This time it just happens to be about me.

I’m in Woodbury today. I’ve spent a couple weeks of being out of my comfort zone in my own community and becoming submerged in it. I’ve been meeting people who don’t look like me or speak my language, shopping at local businesses, walking up and down commercial streets, visiting community centers, chatting with organizational contacts, and emailing what feel like little messages in bottles from my desk at the Community Council. I’ve been driving my child to various appointments and daycare 15 minutes away.  But the rest of the time, I haven’t left the Bluff. After receiving news that my daycare provider was ill today, I took an opportunity to escape.

I’d like to say I’ve been creating potentially lasting, mutually beneficial relationships. But this has been lonely. The only people who really know what I’m doing are my two bosses, and they’re incredibly busy. I never see my friends between my jobs, RollerGirls practice, rehabbing my torn leg muscle, and the aforementioned driving. I started painting my son’s room last week, and I’ve managed to finish one wall. By the time my spouse and I sit down together at night, all I want to do is escape to TV or a novel.

I’m wondering how to balance this kind of life. I’ve long known that anyone with a focus outside their household—especially in human services or community work—is apt to have imbalance. I certainly remember as a high school teacher and theatre director, I’d spend few hours at home, with stacks of paperwork in tow. Now that I’m back outside the home, piles of laundry again begin to look like cruel practical jokes when I’ve been scanning the horizons of a community I love.

I’ve been tempted to start claiming smaller territory, narrowing my horizons, or lowering my standards for success. Building a cross-cultural team to survey the community’s assets seems so far to be an exercise in meeting scores of organizational leaders, and then finding ways to earn their trust so that they’ll connect me with team-members. So far I have one person, and I met her on my own.

Every once in a while, I’ll find someone who not only understands my vision, but shares it. But more often than not, I find those who misunderstand what I’m trying to do; who like it but don’t have the time to help; who write me off as an idealist; or—in once recent humiliation—someone who makes inappropriate advances.

I’m starting with the leaders, rather than neighbors, because there was this grant I helped get last June. But the thing about grants is that they have timelines that usually last one year. So as I was blissfully building relationships and networks for 6 months or so, I didn’t really make a project plan to create a measureable outcome. So now I’m working my networks, and the ones that seem to be the low-hanging fruit are any leaders I can reach.

I’m beginning to wonder if that was a mistake, but in the world of the nonprofit, the grueling yearly cycle means that you can’t spend much of your time in messy stuff like walking around, exchanging favors and recipes, chatting with counter-help, becoming a regular at the local thrift store, and chatting about deep stuff. Because all that activity—what I consider weaving the fabric of community—isn’t what you can get paid for. It doesn’t yield measurable results in short order.

But—done en masse—it’s the only thing that will ever counter the isolation and segregation of our culture. I need more time walking around the community. I need to bandy about my vision with my neighbors. How do you turn in a timesheet for that?

Just this morning, I was handed a binder of the latest grant requirements for a few foundations. While I love the work the foundations wish to accomplish, I find I’m less and less interested in doing them myself.

I want to connect people to one another, mostly. But the more I live in this world of the nonprofit, the more my brain betrays me, connecting people to programs—in essence, turning them into clients. Nevertheless,  if I want to map the assets of Dayton’s Bluff, I need capacity to do it. I need flyers and business cards and resources and researcher trainings and meeting spaces and childcare and inventory sheets and data analysis.

How long would it take me to find ordinary folks who could provide all that? Particularly unpaid volunteers?

I’m stuck in this moment with no one to talk to except the Internet. What an age we live in.