We hope you had a wonderful July 4th holiday, the official start of a busy Adirondack summer. As we celebrate our 25th anniversary, we continue to reflect on accomplishments, celebrate progress, and envision a positive future for the entire Adirondack region.
We are also beginning a concerted effort to listen. This spring we surveyed our neighbors across the region who shared their concerns about everything from the lack of affordable housing and struggling small businesses, to the vibrancy of their downtowns. While many felt that their sense of community has been strengthened since the start of the pandemic, others shared that our collective sense of “community” has atrophied. As one respondent noted, “The sense of community has shifted to self," one where we don't practice the "rituals of civic life" — the simple acts of holding the door for someone or returning a shopping cart to the corral outside the grocery store.
The question, "What does community mean to you?" elicited responses that remind us what is at the heart of a community. We find these insights especially poignant during a time when our society is facing stark divides on issues from women's reproductive rights, gun control, and race, to the lack of common ground we are able to find with one another in our everyday lives. Here are some powerful examples:
- "A community to me means a place where residents live and work together creating the best possible quality of life as well as opportunities for each other."
- "Community means equal access to experiences and places. It means sharing our town with people who care about one another, our environment, and the future."
- "Community means people who care about each other and help each other out. Differences in religious or political belief don't matter, people work for a common goal."
In this post pandemic period, we recognize our role in helping the region strive toward economic resilience — to not only “bounce back” but to come out of this crisis stronger and more united. This means building even more partnerships to broaden understanding of where change can happen and guiding donors toward critical community investments. It also means ensuring our communities are a part of the conversation — that we can find ways to help people come together, listen, bridge divides, and uphold the tenets of democracy. No other organization connects our communities in the same way.
The way forward is together. We thank you for being in community with us — and challenge you to continue to look past our differences so that we can work together for each other to strengthen our collective sense of community in the Adirondack region.
