Reflections

We begin with lofty ambitions and idealized dreams of what could be.

Yet it is so easy to get caught up in the day to day. For the big picture to be obscured by the minutiae. 

We develop a plan of action in order to realize these dreams.

Yet so often we become consumed by the goal and forget about true necessities along the way. 

In a field (read: cultural sustainability) where personal relationships are integral to success and stability, one must not lose sight of these connections. What I come away from in this first MACS foray into cultural sustainability is a sense of grounding. It has reconnected me with the importance of personal connections. It has made me lift my head up a little bit and look at my surroundings rather than the ground directly in front. Sometimes this work means taking a step back, sitting down, and ‘having a beer’ in community with those that you seek to get to know. 

A year and a half into working here at Billings Forge Community Works, I feel like I have only recently begun to really get my feet wet; to receive as well as be received. I am reminded of the need for continued dialogue with people in this community and am uplifted by these interactions. I make sure to smile when crossing paths with someone on the street, to stop and ask the kids how school is going, to lend an ear to a friend in need. Through these small gestures I am reinvigorated, I am recharged. This is the true gift for me; a gift that enables me to give more.

A healthy debate

“Hartford a Dead City? The People Prove Otherwise”

Helen Ubinas

August 31, 2010 | Hartford Courant 

Hey pollsters, go find yourself another whipping boy.

Seriously. I was on vacation last week, so I’m coming late to this. But while I was away, Hartford ranked third in a list of America’s Ten Dead Cities.

Oh, please.

Dead cities don’t have hundreds of people showing up for the Week of the Parks — 264 volunteers helped clean the city’s parks, thank you very much.

Dead cities don’t have the kind of people who exhibited enormous kindness for an elderly robbery victim last week.

In case you missed my colleague Jenna Carlesso’s touching story, I’m talking about a pastor and a member of his youth group who raised money for a 74-year-old woman who was robbed at gunpoint at a Blue Hills ATM a few weeks back. The thugs took her gold chain with a cross pendant and $20.

With the help of Pastor Sam Saylor, a lemonade stand was set up in front of the bank with an inspired sign that read: “Thirst Against Thugs.”

By the end of the day, more than $220 was raised. They plan to present a new necklace and the remaining cash to the robbery victim soon.

Oh, Hartford’s got its issues. Some real doozies, as my colleague Dan Haar pointed out in his column. But to paraphrase Haar — we’re nowhere near dead.

If we’re a dead city, Haar wrote, “tell that to the 365,000 people who visited the new science center in its first year, and to the thousands who came out to free jazz concerts in Bushnell Park, or to the folks playing Ultimate Frisbee in that park many weekdays at lunchtime, from United Technologies and other strong employers.

Haar makes some great, impassioned points. But more than any science center or park or concert hall, you know what really convinces me every day that this city isn’t dead?

The people. Those who live here, and those who don’t but still care deeply about the capital city.

Sorry, but a dead city doesn’t have this much heart.

Copyright (c) 2010, The Hartford Courant, Conn.

Check out the original article:

http://www.courant.com/business/hc-haar-0827-20100826,0,4694083.column

Cultural Sustainability at Billings Forge Community Works

For the past year and a half, I have had the great fortune of working for a small community development non-profit called Billings Forge Community Works. The mission of our organization is to promote the revitalization of the Frog Hollow neighborhood of Hartford through jobs, food, arts and housing. I wear many hats daily and love every moment of it. It was a no brainer, really, in determining how I saw this fitting into my Cultural Sustainability Masters program. This would be my project. 

The work that I am doing is a perfect marriage of sustainable agriculture and the arts (of which I have a background in both) and is housed within an extremely vibrant Latino culture. It is integral to my well being and I like to think that my presence there is likewise received. 

While I seek to maintain and develop our mission and associated programs, it is my goal to explore the notions of identity among the people who live in this community. Frog Hollow has been a neighborhood in flux for generations and delving into this idea will help to provide context for my work; a gateway to understanding community needs and culture. This is of particular importance, for without a grounding and an openness it is very easy to stray towards a path of assumptions and self driven ambitions.

I sort of fell into this project. Before moving back to Hartford, I had never envisioned myself living here long term. Since graduating from college I had not lived in one place for longer than a period of six months, and each place was radically different from the next. The travel bug has bitten me hard, so it wasn’t uncommon for me to be planning my next trip even after just settling down in a new location. But something has stuck here. I feel passionate about the work that I do, and the people I work with. It is important to me to utilize this passion and focus my talents and energies on a community that I have grown to love and become a part of in a way. The community and the people within it face a number of issues that our organization seeks to alleviate or provide an outlet for. Access to healthy, affordable food is a right not a privilege. People want a place where their kids can play safely and constructively. They want a job that will provide for them and their family. Ultimately, we want to live in a world and a community where we don’t have to worry about where the next paycheck is coming from or fear for the safety of our children. I am interested in how things came to be, and am driven to make them better. This compels me to stay, and so here I am a year and a half later thinking not about my next around the world adventure, but of my day at work tomorrow.

Check this out!!!

Really cool resource for exploring local food options in your community! The is a great forum for exchange and interaction.

http://www.realtimefarms.com/

“To recover from our disease of limitlessness, we will have to give up the idea that we have a right to be godlike animals, that we are potentially omniscient and omnipotent, ready to discover “the secret of the universe.” We will have to start over, with a different and much older premise: the naturalness and, for creatures of limited intelligence, the necessity, of limits. We must learn again to ask how we can make the most of what we are, what we have, what we have been given. If we always have a theoretically better substitute available from somebody or someplace else, we will never make the most of anything.” 

-Faustian Economics, Wendell Berry

 

I find this statement to ring quite true. The current mechanisms of society run contrary to an idea of sustainability and do not allow for anything other than a band-aid to cover up our problems. Instead of finding the root of the problem, we treat the symptoms. As one of my colleagues put it, instead of constantly inventing and devising ‘solutions’, why can’t we err on the side of caution when faced with uncertainty? My question is how we can create this shift in thinking. Where do we start? Perhaps the answer that first emerges is with children; changing the model and setting the example from the beginning of the cycle of learning. But does that mean we resign ourselves to the status quo with older generations? What about the government? Can we rely on legislation to make deep and effective change? We have seen that the grassroots movement has had sweeping recent success, so perhaps this is a vehicle for change? This question has some real social and political implications and is often found in the social justice realm…but how do we get people to care enough to change?

Mmm….for fear of sounding somewhat apocalyptic I mean to pose this as an optimistic point of departure rather than a relinquishing of the hope that we can change. I would offer that the passions of an individual are a good place for this change to start. It took the strength of one woman on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama to take on the resistance of a nation. It took the pages of one book to unearth the atrocities of the Chicago meat packing industry, which inevitably led to a regulation crackdown. Change happens all around us; sometimes without much notice and other times with a lot of pomp and circumstance. We must have faith that passion and conviction will prevail in the fight against apathy.

The seeds

Sometimes we need to break down to build up. This doesn’t come easily for those of us who manifest a hard external shell, but it is vital to fully removing the influence of the ego on one’s perception of others. We do not live in a world where everything is rainbows and butterflies. Conflict is sometimes inevitable. It is from these points of struggle where profound growth can occur. Being surrounded by like-minded people who share similar interests, sympathies and values can be as intimidating as it is stimulating. Too often this leads to a sidestepping of delicate issues in keeping with a certain level of ‘political correctness’ or inclusion. But when these issues actually come to a head, the level of discomfort is painful yet cathartic; a point of tension and release. From this moment onwards, I think we are able to lose some of our ego and fill it instead with a bit of each other. 

Growing up in a liberal pocket of the Northeast nourished an open mind and an ability to understand a variety of viewpoints. My involvement in various civil liberties groups in high school, my love of books, and the stellar example set by my parents allowed me to develop into adolescence and adulthood with the knowledge of a broader and interconnected world. Traveling through a number of homes and cultures across the globe forced me to step outside of myself; encouraging a real inner growth whilst creating recipe ripe for a global and objective mindset. Or so I thought. 

We all have our pitfalls, our biases, our ignorance. By nature of experience, we are no tabula rasa. As revealed to me during ten intense days amongst peer and professor wisdom in the Masters of Cultural Sustainability program at Goucher College, it is what we do with this knowledge and how we allow ourselves to recognize our shaped experience that is most important. Approaching newness with openness and no expectation is the key to successful and meaningful understanding. Our economy (read: society) is one of individualism and self gain, but if we can see that while we are but one in a giant machine of interwoven parts, our machine will be able to function more smoothly. 

Wendell Berry’s talks about identity as the locus of deliberately maintained connections rather than an impulse of selfhood. This idea of networks and interconnectivity often emerged during the MACS program residency, as well as in our attempts to try and define cultural sustainability. There is no one clear picture but a mosaic of images that connect and relate to each other in varying ways. It is so easy in this day and age to lose perspective as broadmindedness gives way to routine and the prevalence of community succumbs to the power of the individual. It was clear by the end of the residency, however, that we all were connected to one another in some way. Our lives had touched….and will continue to do so.

When I think about the intensity of the week, I find it rather analogous to fertilizer. A plant will grow on its own (provided the climate is right), but if you enrich it with a little bit of fertilizer…BAM the process is accelerated! This residency definitely nourished my tree and from it a new branch was sprouted. While still integral and connected to my other branches, this branch is budding a path of its own. It, as well as the whole tree, will continue to be nourished by these experiences and contributions. Using this program as a vehicle going forward, it is my hope that this weblog space can serve alongside as a platform for community exploration and understanding in Hartford.