When Helen McCarrol was called to preach decades ago, she was turned away from the Baptist churches she approached in Birmingham. They didn’t have a place for her, because most Baptist congregations only allow men to become pastors. So Helen went out on her own and founded the Rising Star Holiness Church on Tuscaloosa Avenue. The storefront church stands near the end of a long block, by a gas station, some boarded-up businesses and a few empty lots. Her congregation has remained small– she often preaches to a room full of empty pews– but Pastor Helen holds services few times a week at Rising Star Holiness whether people show up or not.

Listen to our radio episode, Birmingham – The Long Story Short, for more Birmingham stories. Waiting for Her Flock was produced by SOTRU intern Sylvie Kovnat with photography by local artist Dana Smithberg and sound recording by SOTRU Radio Producer Laura Starecheski.

College graduations are physically and emotionally draining. The days are long – packed with official ceremonies, lists of names read slowly in alphabetical order, and dress shoes filing one by one across the stage. Relatives come to visit, nobody gets enough sleep, and there’s still so much packing to do. To top it all off, you receive a single piece of paper, your diploma, and suddenly everything seems to change. The academic bubble bursts and it’s time to leave the friends who have become like family.

A few days ago I graduated from Northwestern University, and yesterday I said goodbye to one of my best friends. The moments before he left were ordinary: we met another friend at a café; we talked about the GRE exam, subletters and summer jobs; we drove home and listened to pop songs on the radio. Then we hugged and said we’d see each other soon, and I knew we would, but I still had to fight tears as I turned to walk away.

Hours later I sat in my bedroom, resisting a cliché temptation to play Vitamin C’s graduation song as I tried to determine why these goodbyes are so hard for me, even when I know they’re not forever. I’m not sad about losing my friends because I know I won’t – we’ll make an effort to visit each other soon, wherever we end up. I’m sad about losing something greater – the community we created here at Northwestern – because we’ll never again live in the same place at once. We won’t be able to hop in the car for a weekend road trip to Michigan, head to a café for coffee, or go to someone’s apartment for a late night game of cards.

As a student I always considered college in terms of exams and GPA, but lately I’ve been thinking about it much more in terms of community. In many ways, college was the first time I really learned what a community is and why it’s so important. I grew up in a great neighborhood when I was younger, but my parents and family members were my main support network. At Northwestern I had an opportunity to live with people who were my age, had similar interests and were going through many of the same challenges. Away from my family and home, I made friends and expanded my support network – creating a new family and a new home for myself, which is what I think community means.

Northwestern’s commencement speaker this year was Stephen Colbert, an alumni and TV sensation who entertained us with stories about his own time at Northwestern. In between jokes, he slipped in a serious message about community that I found quite compelling. He spoke about his move to Chicago and the beginning of his improv career with Second City.

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“Now, there are very few rules to improvisation, but one of the things I was taught early on is that you are not the most important person in the scene. Everybody else is. And if they are the most important people in the scene, you will naturally pay attention to them and serve them. But the good news is you’re in the scene, too, so hopefully to them you’re the most important person, and they will serve you. No one is leading. You’re all following the follower, serving the servant. You cannot win improv.

And life is an improvisation. You have no idea what’s going to happen next and you are mostly just making things up as you go along. And like improv, you cannot win your life – even when it might look like you’re winning. I have my own show, which I love doing, full of very talented people ready to serve me. And it’s great. But at my best, I am serving them just as hard, and together we serve a common idea – in this case the character Stephen Colbert, who it’s clear isn’t interested in serving anyone. And a sure sign that things are going well is when no one can really remember whose idea was whose, or who should get credit for what jokes (though naturally I get credit for all of them).

But if we should serve others, and together serve some common goal or idea – for any one, what is that idea and who are those people? In my experience, you will truly serve only what you love, because as the prophet says, service is love made visible. If you love friends, you will serve your friends. If you love community, you will serve your community. If you love money, you will serve money. And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself, and you will have only yourself. So no more winning. Instead, try to love others and serve others, and hopefully find those who love and serve you in return.”

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These past few months, I’ve been consumed with worry about finding a job and being successful in “the real world.” But now that graduation is over, as I scour the job postings and start my applications, I can only think about my friends. I’m worried about moving to a new city by myself and trying to build another support network, worried about starting over from scratch.  I still want to be successful, sure, but more than that I want to live with a close group of friends. As Colbert recommends, I want to love and serve others, to find others who love me in return.

So for now I sit in a mostly empty room and imagine moving away. I forbid myself from playing Vitamin C’s graduation song but can’t help looking through old photo albums of my friends. And I wonder why I never realize until the very end just how important a person or place has been to my life. Why is it always the night before moving day, amidst packed boxes and blank walls, that I suddenly understand what it means to have a home? Why is it in the ordinary moments before goodbye, driving in the car with pop songs on the radio, that I feel how wonderful it is to have a friend?

As a college student I became part of a community, and as a college graduate I know I’ll miss that community dearly. As I move forward into the real world I’ll try to keep my friends close, and I can only hope that I’ll remember to appreciate how much they mean to me while we’re still together.

More politicians are mobilizing supporters and raising buckets of dollars through “money blurts” – intentionally-timed, incendiary comments about opponents that stoke social media and rake in cash. But we live at a time when we need to mobilize people to address our growing concerns, not divide them. Below are two sets of sound bites, one rooted in hate, the other in hope. The hopeful ones you can bank on as antidotes to growing negativity in public life.

The article in yesterday’s Washington Post showed how politicians are doing the equivalent of yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre, knowing full well what they’re saying is wrong and will have negative repercussions, but they do it anyway. In public life, such comments undermine trust, make the public square toxic, and push people further away from one another.

The Post offered examples of “money blurts” used by Democrats and Republicans alike. You may remember the one in which Representative Joe Wilson blurted out in the middle of President Obama’s State of the Union message, “You lie!”

Below you’ll find two columns: on the left are negative (even hate-filled) blurts noted in the Post article; on the right, alternate ones I have found engender authentic hope in people. These latter ones are time-tested, positive “blurts” you can start using today. Notice how the hateful ones work to divide people, while the hopeful ones actively engage people.

Hate	Hope
“You lie!” You have “anti-American views” You are “turning our country into a nation of slaves” About health care reform: “Don’t get sick, and if you get sick, die soon”	How can we get things moving in the right direction? Why do you say that? What will it take for me to earn your trust? What in your daily life gives you hope?

If we’re going to effectively address our pressing challenges today – such as how to ensure that every child gets a good education – then we must find ways to mobilize Americans to come back into the public square, join arms, and work together. My own work suggests that people are yearning to re-engage and re-connect; indeed, they want to restore their belief in our individual and collective ability to get things done, not just for our own good, but the common good.

If you agree, then use those blurts that engender authentic hope. What’s more, offer here your own examples of when you’ve heard sound bites rooted in hope or hate. And let me know how things go.

Let’s get things moving in a better direction.

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A dynamic public speaker, Rich Harwood is a frequent keynote for foundations and national organizations. He is an expert contributor on national and syndicated media outlets including MSNBC, NPR, The Christian Science Monitor, CNN’s Inside Politics, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Special Report with Brit Hume, C-SPAN, and many others. He is also the author of Hope Unraveled: The people’s retreat and our way back (2005), Make Hope Real: How we can accelerate change for the public good (2008) and numerous studies, articles and essays chronicling vital issues of our time. His most recent written work, Why We’re Here: The Powerful Impact of Public Broadcasters When They Turn Outward, is being published and distributed in Spring 2011. You can follow him on twitter @RichHarwood and facebook.com/richharwood.

You can read Rich’s posts every Tuesday on State of the Re:Union’s website.

Part 2 of a 4 Part Series

State of the Re:Union is thrilled to present the next installment  of this series put together by the Ticonderoga Revitalization Alliance. If you didn’t catch part 1, you can now! Enjoy and be sure to let us know what you think of the work they’re doing.

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Today, Ticonderoga presents a different picture. The graphite mine and mill are long-closed, and the pencil company relocated to Florida. The paper mill, since bought and re-built by International Paper, has become a progressive and concerned employer that, in order to improve labor efficiencies in a competitive market, hires roughly half the employees it used to hire. The rich have moved on to other vacation destinations and Ticonderoga has been slow to adjust to the demands of the new, middle-class tourists. Last year, of some eight million visitors to the Park, only a hundred thousand passed through Ticonderoga.

These days, jobs are hard to come by. Downtown vacancy rates are pressing 40% and property values have plunged. The social costs, especially for the young and uneducated, are daunting. Those who do pursue higher education rarely return to the town, leaving behind low-wage under-employment and an increasing elderly population. Meanwhile, despite the school district’s high ranking, twenty percent of local high school students do not make it to graduation. More than one in four citizens receive some form of poverty assistance and one in seven families face the high social costs of these tough economic times, whether they be drugs, unwanted pregnancies or domestic violence.

From a roar to a whimper, Ticonderoga, like a number of small American towns, has tumbled into its own vicious and closed loop economy, whereby absent a fresh and continuing inflow of capital, people and ideas, the Town is condemned to ever diminishing servings of its stale economic pie.

The Real Conundrum

There was a time when prospective employers could be attracted by the promise of low-wage labor and tax concessions. Today, the rules have changed.

Companies compete for knowledge-based labor forces –only highly educated, high-pay workers need apply. To retain these “knowledge workers,” communities and companies need to provide a significant improvement in quality of life – an improvement that has proved just out of reach for small, under-resourced towns like Ticonderoga.

Only by taking an integrated look at transport, education, energy efficiency, wellness programs, technological capacity and affordable housing can Ticonderoga hope to attract the value-added and knowledge-based jobs that will help to reverse its downward economic spiral.

Ticonderoga faces simple questions – with complex answers – about how and where to start its revitalization process. First, how can the educational level of its citizenry be raised to attract the jobs that will support such an educated work force? Conversely, how can Ticonderoga attract the companies and jobs it needs with limited purchasing capacity and human educational capital? Second, how can Ticonderoga attract fresh people, capital and ideas to mitigate its current lack of cultural diversity? Today, the town is defined predominantly by two factions– those who hail from one of the six families whose forbears helped to settle the region, who today manage a good part of the Town’s inner workings and “back acreage” land, and the middle class families whose parents and grandparents settled here over the last fifty to seventy-five years, who grew up on Lake George and returned, in some capacity, to their hometown of Ticonderoga. Addressing these factions and facing them, not against each other, but against the town’s current social costs, has been the first step in the revitalization process.

Anatomy of a Town

Over the years, in Ticonderoga, both factions and their splinter groups have been locked in win-lose ideology. Taxes, development and the environment have been sore spots of conflict. The inextricable links between each of these issues have been hard to embrace in their totality. And yet, the anatomy of a small town is truly similar to that of our own. As the song goes, our hipbone really is connected to our thighbone and our thighbone to our shinbone. More profoundly, our internal organs are connected through vital streams just as we are connected to our family, friends, and neighbors. Just as surely, a strong downtown business district will positively impact the Four Corners’ retail district expansion, which will reinforce Ticonderoga’s regional hub status, which will enhance the number of visitors to the Fort as well as to the historic downtown Main Street. Indeed, almost everything impacts everything else.

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The alliance has produced video interviews with residents and alliance members alike so that you can hear about their experience and fascinating stories first hand. This is Beth Hill, Executive Director of the recently transplanted Fort Ticonderoga. Below is part one of a two part interview. Visit the Ticonderoga Revitalization Alliance website to watch the other part, the other interviews, and to see the incredible photographs and other inspiring features.

Interviews conducted and produced by Josh Clement. Contact Josh here.

Be sure to visit Monday, July 11th, for part 3, “Birth of the Alliance,” and don’t forget to visit their official website for other features, information and updates.

Going from the big city to the countryside can be quite a challenge. Saying goodbye to the fancy coffee shops, sushi on the go and public transportation, as I moved across the country from Washington, D.C. to a very rural part of Washington state, I wondered what I was getting into. Beyond the big city’s amenities, I was worried about the community of friends, neighbors and co-workers I left behind. Here, my closest “neighbor” is a grain silo overlooking a few dozen acres of alfalfa. So instead of trying to find the big city in the countryside, I decided to embrace my new life and the offerings of living so close to nature. In particular, I was excited about the readily available fresh produce. Sure, you can get locally grown produce at the farmer’s markets in the Dupont Circles and Union Squares of the big cities out east, and, on occasion, I would buy a dozen eggs and a loaf of bread for $15. But I was ready to find accessible produce that could be eaten on a daily basis and not just as a special treat.

Upon arriving here, one of the first things I did was join a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm.  As the name suggests, CSAs involve the public community supporting a farm through buying “shares,” typically consisting of a box of seasonal produce, offered weekly during the harvest season, which runs roughly from May through November. Over the last 20 years, CSAs have become a popular way for consumers to buy locally grown food directly from a farmer, and for farmers to receive financial support from the community.

This system benefits both parties in an impressive show of synergy. The farmers receive payment early in the season which helps with their cash flow, as well as having the opportunity to know the people to whom the fruits of their labor go. And members of CSAs get to know who is producing that food, creating a relationship with the farmer, the land, and their surroundings. Additionally, the food is fresh, local, and often organic. At the same time, one element of joining a CSA accepting shared risk. With a CSA, there is no guarantee of what you will get; it depends on what is growing and being harvested. This promotes the feeling that we are all in on this together; if the farm is productive, we reap the benefits and if it suffers we feel the consequences.

Schreiber & Sons, the CSA I joined, started offering community shares to the public in 2006. Along with the box of organic produce, I get a weekly email, telling me what is going to be in my box and what is going on at the farm; that the tomatoes will be out later this year due to the unusually cool spring or cilantro is suddenly plentiful due to a few warm days. This new sense of connection with my environment allows me to see how much the weather impacts agriculture, and now, me. Coming from a city, rain used to mean that I had to wear a rain jacket. Cold temperatures caused me to leave the house with an extra sweater. Now, these things translate into the amount of mixed greens and strawberries I will be eating.

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The true beauty for me though, is the way that CSAs draw people together.

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“In a lot of communities, with the whole agricultural system in this country, the farmer was getting more and more pushed off to the periphery where you actually didn’t know your farmer as a member of the community. He was the guy that lived on the outskirts of town and you never actually went to his farm to visit. I think this is pulling that member of the community back into the circle where he or she can be seen,” said Pete Shelton, a fellow CSA member, who himself spent some time working on a CSA farm.

In my case, this union of farmer and consumer came to fruition at a Farm Party. Schreiber & Sons has two Farm Parties a year, one in the spring, which I went to last weekend, and one in the fall. This party involved a farm tour followed by a roasted pig and grilled asparagus provided by the farm and long tables piled with pot-luck dishes brought by all of the members of the CSA; about 200 showed up. Handwritten recipes next to the dishes illustrated the numerous ways the farm’s bounty could be prepared. The food was delicious, the conversation easy, and I was struck by how naturally the community was brought together as we were led through fields of cilantro and greenhouses full of peppers, marveling at all the work it took to bring us the food we ate each week.

“Generally CSA’s do things that connect their members to what they do. We’re really taking people who have not been involved in farming like this and putting them into an agriculture area and we really are connecting them to the food and where the food comes from,” said Alan Schreiber, owner of Schreiber & Sons.

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Having been introduced to the CSA model has connected me to my food, my community, my farmer and my creativity.

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But we were also connecting with each other as we sat on the lawn and ate the homemade food and swapped stories about what we were doing with the weekly radishes in our CSA boxes. These were people I had not known until the Farm Party, who were now inviting me over for their next pot luck dinner.

Though there is no official count of how many CSAs are currently in the U.S., Local Harvest has the most comprehensive directory of CSA farms, with more than 4,000 listed in its database. I am glad to hear they are on the rise. This new model of farming is redefining property ownership, creating new forms of cooperation and a new agricultural economy for farmers that want to go beyond the large scale agribusinesses our farmland has been turned into. It’s a model that connects us and allows mutual benefit to be the rule.

Opening my box each week is like a little adventure. And I know that all over town, my fellow CSA member are opening their boxes and figuring out how to turn that into dinner. We have had a lot of asparagus so far this season, so I’ve had to come up with new and interesting ways of eating it, branching out from grilled asparagus to asparagus soup and asparagus salad. But it is more than being overjoyed by the abundance of fresh and healthy produce. I already ate pretty well in D.C., doing my shopping at Whole Foods and the occasional stint at the overpriced farmers market, but I never felt any connection to my fellow Whole Foods shoppers, or the people I bumped into at the weekly farmers markets. Having been introduced to the CSA model has connected me to my food, my community, my farmer and my creativity. My newsletter said next week’s box will include strawberries and rhubarb, so I already know a pie is in my future.

I’m trying to remember when I made the transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn,” a critical developmental stage for children. Education experts agree, third grade is a turning point for most students, a time when successful learners make that transition. Kids who don’t achieve grade level reading by fourth grade are likely to lose more and more ground in coming years.

I’m not sure which year it was for me—second grade, third grade—but I think it was when I started reading a series of little orange biographies about famous figures in American history. I remember in particular a biography of Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” a guerilla leader in South Carolina during the Revolutionary War. If memory serves, his biography may have sparked my imagination because there was a Disney version on TV starring the late great Canadian actor, Leslie Neilsen.

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“In addition to improving their reading, these kids have come to experience the joy of learning and discovery,” he notes, “and that doesn’t always occur in a traditional classroom environment.”

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Later on I was disillusioned to discover that Marion’s heroic exploits may have been exaggerated by the notorious colonial era hagiographer Parson Weems (Et tu Zorro?) but the point here is reading. Once a kid discovers the pleasures of reading, as I did with those little orange biographies, it opens up all kinds of possibilities.

For many low income kids, however, summer break poses a particular problem. Unless kids are either inclined to read (or encouraged to read by their parents) summer break can further the appalling gap that often develops between the reading skills of low income students and more affluent learners.

Taking this challenge to heart, two businessmen in Richmond, Indiana, decided to organize a summer “Third Grade Reading Academy” for 100 underachieving readers a year. The idea hit a responsive chord in the community, which ponied up $150,000 in contributions ranging from $10 to $20,000.

Originally, the plan was to hold the academy at local middle school. It was teachers who nixed the idea. “Kids don’t really look forward to going back to school in the summer,” notes Vic Jose, one of the founders, “so we sort of decentralized the academy to a variety of different locations.”

Classes have been held at the local historical museum, a swimming pool, a wellness center, a public library and a university athletic center to break up the monotony. The decision made logistics such as transportation and insurance against liability a little more complicated, but the founders think it was worth the trouble.

“We try to make it fun as well as educationally rigorous,” says Jose, a retired businessman and former school board member. “Attendance has always been over 90 percent, which compares well to the 50 to 70 percent rate for regular summer school programs.”

Just to be on the safe side though, the academy created a volunteer auxiliary of “Good Shepherds, who are on call during the summer session to track down students (or their parents) who don’t show up for class.

The results have been impressive. Students who attend the four-week program have raised the reading scores by 50 percent, but there are also intangible benefits, says Steve Borchers, executive director of the Wayne County Community Foundation. “In addition to improving their reading, these kids have come to experience the joy of learning and discovery,” he notes, “and that doesn’t always occur in a traditional classroom environment.”

Plus there is the satisfaction of succeeding and being recognized for it. Every year, the academy holds a celebration at the Civic Hall Performing Arts Center to give medals and certificates to the kids who complete the academy. “Everybody wants the parents to get more involved and nobody can quire figure it out,” says Vic Jose, “When we do the celebration day, Civic Hall is filled with parents. Some have to take a take off time from jobs to get there, but they are going to be when they know their child is going to be given that recognition.”

In 2009, Richmond won an All-America City Award from the National Civic League for outstanding civic accomplishments. The Third Grade Reading Academy was one of the successful local programs highlighted in their application for the award.

Jointly funded by the school district now, the academy is in its fourth year, and word of its success has spread. Two communities in Canada are now using it as a model for their summer reading programs, although they are using a different name, the Reading University. “They can call it anything they want to,” says Vic Jose, “as long as they are helping third graders reach their potential.”

The National Civic League announced Wednesday, June 15, at the All-America City Awards in Kansas City, that it was joining ranks with the Campaign for Grade Level Reading, a national effort to close the gap in reading achievement that separates many low income students from their peers. In 2012, the All-America City Award will have a special focus on communities that mobilize to improve grade level reading. Read more about it by visiting www.allamericacityaward.com. Link here for information on the Campaign for Grade Level Reading.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.