Back to (social) work: Weaving community.

Posted August 11, 2024, by Mindi Wisman

This is the third in our "Back to (Social) Work Series," written by Melanie Wilson, Youth Catalytics’ former research director. This series of posts covers the community activism work she is doing with her Washington State nonprofit, East County Citizens’ Alliance. The previous post can be found here.

Melanie Wilson and crew

“In times like these ….”  Stretching back a few years now, how many published utterances have begun with these words? And how threadbare they’ve become. Our need to express our anxiety far outstrips the language available to do it. I just read an essay by Nadia Bolz-Weber, a tattooed Lutheran minister whom I occasionally read for comfort. She calls our current times “wobbly.” OK, let’s go with that.

In these wobbly times, we can either wring our hands or we can do something. Truly, it’s one or the other. But to state the depressingly obvious, it’s not possible to influence global or national affairs. Practically speaking, nothing any of us can do will make a difference in those arenas. Where can we have an impact, then? That’s easy: in our own communities. There, almost anything is possible. I’ve learned this for a fact.

In our own communities, almost anything is possible. I’ve learned this for a fact.

A couple of years ago, I got together with a few others and started a community-building nonprofit in southwestern Washington State. I had moved here right before the pandemic. My new town on the Columbia River was adorable—in its quirky Mayberry-ness, it reminded me of the Midwest town where I’d grown up, only with a touch of humor and self-awareness.

What I didn’t know at the time was that this sweet little town was smack in the crosshairs of powerful demographic and ideological forces. California transplants and uber-progressive Portland were on one axis and conservative farmers displaced by subdivisions like mine were on the other. Those divisions would create ugly conflicts during the pandemic—the kind of conflicts where people at public meetings threatened to kill each other. Those threats didn’t seem idle.

We thought we needed to do something, and we did. It’s called “weaving.” (We only learned this term a couple of years in, but it’s a pretty good descriptor). Many nonprofits do work that ends up strengthening the social fabric, but weaving is different because strengthening community is the goal, not just a hoped-for outcome.

The point of our project is to nurture bonds between people by engaging them in projects the entire community values.

Mostly, these are new projects—some intended to meet a long-neglected need, some that we develop just for fun—that everyone can feel good about. Projects that, when you see someone doing them, make you feel that despite everything, you’re surrounded by solid people doing good things, and that maybe someone’s looking after your corner of the world after all. Over the last three years, we’ve engaged about 300 different people in civic projects of one kind or another. What kind of projects, precisely? That’s been the easy part. Initially, we just looked around for what needed doing. The pandemic had ended, and kids were back in school. But having spent a year and a half trying to learn from home, many of them were struggling. Could we help? The local high school said yes, and together we developed a mentoring program.

What else was obviously off-kilter? Well, the Columbia River Gorge may be gorgeous, but the highway leading into it—our primary local highway—was utterly trash-blitzed. So we just went out and started cleaning it up. When drivers started yelling thanks out their car windows, we knew we were onto something. So many people have wanted to help that over time, we’ve organized more than 50 cleanup teams. It seems that on a metaphorical and practical level, there’s something deeply satisfying about cleaning up public messes.

On a metaphorical and practical level, there’s something deeply satisfying about cleaning up public messes.

We’ve gone on to cook community meals, organize neighborhood murals, and plant huge swaths of wildflowers. This spring we launched a local audio story project based on StoryCorps. We’re open to any project that will attract a lot of people, and more importantly, different kinds of people. All the projects need to be challenging in some way, both to us—the organizers—and to the people who join us. A lot of the work we do isn’t easy; some of it is hard, even grueling. All the better. Superficial, entertaining experiences have their place, but as a general rule, they’re low-commitment and low-reward. We want the opposite.

The benefits of creating an ever-expanding network of strangers who come together to contribute their effort, money, or expertise have been manifold, but two big ones stand out for me. First, we’ve demonstrated to even skeptical participants that we can accomplish difficult things simply by deciding to. We’re that powerful—but only together. Second, we’ve shown that except for people on the fringes, personal politics almost never matter. Local problems and local opportunities aren’t abstract concepts. They’re real. In the local context, ideas about what’s good or bad just don’t vary that much from person to person.  

What a relief it is to learn that.