Intro

Welcome. This is a new website and first installment where I’ll add thoughts about communities and more loved “homes.”

One can think and feel a lot of different ways about the idea of home, it’s such a big part of what many of us are trying to create in our lifetimes.  There’s everything from people’s lives to art to business to politics to technology.

A question for you: what is the connection between the way you think of or feel about home, and the way you want your community to be?

I’ll start this first post with the personal. And this month you get a double feature because I’ll also write about the recent supreme court decision in Grants Pass, a complicated issue that I followed with sadness.

George Eliot asks, in her short classic Silas Marner, whether we can create a new home for ourselves. When it’s not the place where we grew up and have deep personally historic connections (the character in the story is exiled for religious and personal jealousy reasons). Yet the American story is in part about movement and mobility, from Native Americans opportunistic about trade and natural resources - even adopting the horse - to the more recent immigrants moving for economic opportunity. Mostly African slaves were moved not of their accord, and then when they could move, many chose to. Those deeply personal historic connections are not always wanted. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, there is a move to try to find a new utopian home that is beautiful and bittersweet.

Part of the reason I’ve started this consulting practice is finding over and over again the compelling communities of people and their places, especially in the USA and Latin America. Though my father immigrated from Europe, there is something about this hemisphere, with its pain and endeavoring. Mostly through visits or shorter term work assignments, I did not come upon the permanence George Eliot and perhaps Zora Neale Hurston ascribe to. But can an outsider nevertheless see, feel, and understand how a community can be a home, a good home?

I feel it’s possible. And that’s why I work with communities, leaders, and organizations who want to build the best home possible for them. It seems like there’s work to be done out there. Even having a place to call home physically is quite a challenge for the workforce and people down and out on luck. And many communities are working to reinvent themselves and capture some of the prosperity of our wealthiest-in-the-world nation (look at what one advocate for Bertie County, a place you may not be familar with in eastern NC, has to say). One of these days I’ll write about Del Rio, TX, a hidden quality town full of friendly with a crystal clear spring-fed arroyo running through it people that I had the pleasure of working in.

Write and tell me what you’re feeling or thinking about. I know the age of long-form blogs may be dead and I should be on Twitter I mean X, and tiktok, but I’m 40 and here we are. Thoughts and Expertise.