It’s time to start thinking about ways to improve your community
It’s highly likely that whenever you’re reading this, something at the forefront of the news is tragic and horrible. And that same tragedy was, in all likelihood, somewhat preventable. An overdose, an addiction report, a shooting, arson, or myriad other extreme crimes are outgrowths of a deep fissure in our national consciousness. A “fix” for this isn’t likely from our national leaders. If salt-of-the-earth people want to make a difference, we’re going to have to focus on the people closest to the earth: our local friends and neighbors.
Last Christmas, a small group of people held an annual Christkindl Market in Brown County, Indiana. I was one of the people on the committee who helped spearhead this cozy market in a corner of southern Indiana that Midwest Living magazine named one of their top markets in the Midwest, right up there with Chicago, Carmel, Indiana, and Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s one of the highlights of my career to help bring people together to coordinate and plan this event each year.
Organizing a market is a labor of love
The Brown County Christkindl Market is only two days. But it takes months of planning to scout locations for stages, musicians, food vendors, organize the business community into opening at unusual hours, and all the usual work for marketing, permitting, insurance, and more. A significant amount of time is devoted to just thinking about where toilets can and should go.
You walk around a Market like this and you’re struck by just how nice it all is. Everyone feels good. For a brief couple of days, people of all ages are mingling side-by-side. There are no political sides. There are no metal detectors or bag searches. There are no deadlines or pressures from work or school. People of a certain age might even think, “This must be what it’s like to live in Mayberry.” (It helps that the musicians in Brown County are far better than the off-note, well-meaning Mayberry Band.)
Events like this may seem temporary, but I’m convinced the dividends pay back big. Events like this remind communities who their neighbors are. You remember what it’s like to put down a screen for a few minutes (though plenty of selfie opportunities abound).
I’m not sure if we can fully measure the impact of events like this on a community’s health. But thousands of people from the region visited the Brown County Christkindl Market and benefited from tens of thousands of dollars in impact.
Community events remind people of where they live
Robert Putnam’s best-selling, well-reviewed book Bowling Alone noted, “Community, communion, and communication are intimately as well as etymologically related”. He studied social isolation and loneliness decades before the Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic. He has also linked social isolation to extremism, suggesting that:
“People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.”
Dr. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone
It’s hard to feel divorced from a community, at least for a weekend, when someone offers to take your picture, demonstrates glass blowing, or offers up a free sample of fudge.
I’m not going to tell you that a two-day Christkindl Market will act as a salve for every hurting person in a community. But it is surely a part of a solution. A solution that encourages people to come together in the spirit of the season, if only for a moment, and realize we’re all working our way through life with similar hopes and dreams. That it makes no sense to hate someone who just wants to sip cocoa and watch kids run to Santa while grandma listens to a dulcimer player.
Who can blame kids, given these choices?
Community leaders from the town council to the county commissioners to churches, schools, and large employers like healthcare providers and industry have to come together to resist the downward pressure to scrimp and save by doing nothing. How can we lament “The kids don’t get out,” “The teens have nowhere to go,” and “People seem eager to stay home all the time” if there’s no place to go at 7 pm on a Saturday night?
We can’t simply do nothing because it feels easier. When have Americans ever looked at a big problem and said, “The easier thing would be to do nothing, so I guess we’ll do that”? Somewhere in your community are musicians, artists, craftsmen, vendors, businesses, churches, and more that simply need to be asked to lend their skills and talent.
A healthy, vibrant community of any size should be able to support at least one unique, compelling event every quarter. Where do you start? Identify your community’s natural rhythm, look at what’s not being done already (which is probably quite a bit), and commit yourself to drafting the proposal that begets a new tradition.
Want to hear more about organizing events like this in your community? Contact me and let’s start a conversation.