What makes a community strong?
I asked one recent "design circle."
Neighbors helping neighbors
Making sure no one feels isolated or alone
Checking in on elders and parents of young children
Making decisions together
Showing up to be heard for others as well as yourself
Giving young people real civic responsibility and the tools to accomplish it
Breaking down siloes and hierarchies
Questioning our assumptions about others and listening fully
Thinking in systems and with both head and heart
Honoring our ancestors by making the world/life good for future generations
Reconnecting with and caring for land and water
Reconnecting with the rest of nature inside and outside of our human bodies.
These were some of their many responses. But there was one that came back over and over again and seemed to hold them all together.
Relationships. A feeling of belonging to and in this place.
We are only as resilient as our relationships are strong.
Everybody knows somebody in or near the Mystic River Watershed. The Alliance aims to strengthen our relationships and our resilience from the inside out, even while exploring the potential threats to our safety from outside in (starting with floods and heat). We received a super grant from the Long Island Sound Study (EPA) and managed by UConn SeaGrant's office for Sustainable and Resilient Communities to understand vulnerabilities to climate impacts in our watershed from I-95 north to Lantern Hill. We hired Fuss & O'Neill.
But this isn't the usual Vulnerability Assessment that looks at the numbers, runs a focus group, analyzes the data and then reveals recommendations that the community has to "buy in" to...or not. Our recommendations for our Watershed Resilience Action Plan will be based on our collective knowledge about our experiences of flooding and changes brought about by heat and other climate impacts, how we define terms like "community" and "resilience," what we want to ask of the numerical data (what we need to learn more about), and what we want to do to keep our communities safe. The recommendations that go into our Watershed Resilience Action Plan will be co-designed by us working with experts.
This fall, we will be mapping our relationships focusing on the area around I-95 north to Lantern Hill ("I live here; I know someone who lives there, and there") so that we are sure to include everyone. Everyone has a story. We will be gathering and compiling our stories because they will help to direct what we want to do to make our communities strong and resilient. We will be inviting you to participate in fun learning / decision-making activities and conversation/design circles. There will be "safe-space" protocols to follow to keep us focused on what we all care about, and there will be food and if we're lucky, music.
Would you like to be involved? Help plan some fun events? Help visit with neighbors and listen to what they know? Help decide what we want to do about our concerns? Are you willing to be part of safe, listening and learning and planning "design circles" ?
Please consider making a donation to help us shift the paradigm from top-down, one-size fits-all solutions to plans we can all get behind because we made them...and to make it feel like a block party while we're at it.
This is going to be awesome. Thank you for participating!
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