Intentional Social Capital.
When Someone Will Be There to Hold You Up.
Last week, at the behest of the amazing project that is Nevada Humanities, I got to do a multi-day tour through Northern Nevada towns of Dayton and Silver City promoting my book and speaking to people who are part of a community advocacy project called Healthy Communities Coalition (HCC). Then, we did a final stint in Reno at the annual Literary Crawl, and at The University of Reno for a talk with grad and undergraduate writing and journalism students.
I had the pleasure of speaking to about 50ish members of the coalition last week. The group as a whole covers almost every need in the community.
I met people focused on dementia care for the elderly, folks focused on incarcerated people and the ways incarceration impacts the whole family and can drive them into poverty. There were social workers, people advocating to get more people to foster children (there are often zero families to foster kids in rural areas right now), some were advocating for issues specific to native communities, others for healthcare and insurance, veteran services, mental health supports. And a host of volunteers who get people signed up for things they need, filling out their applications and making phone calls on their behalf.
I met an elder, and her guide dog. She works the food pantry, guides new people through the food aisles, letting them know it’s all okay and there is no shame. She and her dog are a little legendary in the community. Since her husband passed, the pantry raises her up, in the same way she calms the nerves of people coming in for help for the first time.
The first thing you notice about HCC is the built-in reciprosity and equity.
A Little History.
HCC came together after the 2008 banking crisis that pushed Nevada into hard times. Families, for instance in Dayton, Nevada (current population 16,490) started showing up to their pantry with major food needs. The pantry brought in 500 volunteers, who themselves had lost jobs. They worked the pantry as volunteers and also received food, creating a kind equity for people during tough times. They gave and they received in equal measure.
A community of helping emerged. It took on a life of its own, spiraling out into a web of protection and safety for the people involved. Here’s how it went:
Step 1: Making Volunteer-Run Food Pantries. These food hubs helped the community a lot. But they noticed more and more families coming in with major needs that were bigger than just the food. They took the pulse of the community and knew they had to tackle more than a single problem - food. The net needed to be wider. A coalition was born.
Step 2: Creating School Gardens/ Culinary Education in schools. Their next effort as a coalition was creating school gardens and implementing cooking and eating education programs in schools. I have talked in the past about how food and education are now separate and how that impacts children and adults. This program was designed to combat that. They created garden programs in five elementary, two middle schools, one highschool and three community gardens, all helmed and guided by activist farmers and master gardeners, Marcia and Steve Litsinger. (Edible Reno-Tahoe called them Organic Avengers and they are!) They introduced bees and produced local honey.
Step 3: Bringing Local Fruit + Veg to Farmers Markets at Affordable Prices.
Their next effort was to use some of the fruit and vegetables they had grown in the school and community gardens for the greater communities, so they created farmers markets, in Dayton and Silver City, and in smaller communities nearby. This gave people affordable access to locally grown foods. They also declined charging producers for space at the markets to ensure the lowest prices for buyers.
Step 4: Organizing the Silver Stage Co-Op. By buying food in bulk for wholesale prices, the coalition offers their people nutritious foods at lower-than-retail pricing with a lot more diversity and cultural relavance than just taking from the food bank system. They brought in EBT machines and started including cooking classes that highlight local ingredients to get people cooking and eating better.
Step 5: Bringing Food + Food Entrepreneurship into Schools. The coalition is not afraid to be political - they were integral to getting the food cottage laws instituted in Nevada. Then, they set up food pantries inside schools because they provide immediate access to families in the community. And they allowed cottage and micro food businesses to use school kitchens to produce foods that can be purchased at their food markets, like fermented foods, canned and pickled products, breads and baked goods, and jams and jellies.
Step 6: Bringing Mobile Healthcare to The Rurals. The coalition knew that setting people up for good health wasn’t just about vegetables, it involved medical care. They created MORE (Mobile Outreach Response Event) where people could access free screenings for things like blood pressure, immunizations, cardiac care, eye care, dental and make appointments for medical care. Volunteers signed people up for available programs, medicaid and got them started on accessing better care. The team also helped pass state legislation that made it legal for licensed medical professionals from other states to come to Nevada to offer free care at their pop-ups
And this last step, Stage 7: Bringing in the community is, for me, the most vital + impressive part of HCC’s vision. The coalition created, essentially, an invisible manifesto that guides them in dealing with people in their communities. It surpasses the idea of DEI by almost totally removing any kind of coded political language and, in fact, is very simple: Every human in the community has a place in their organization, both as a giver and as a receiver, despite age, disability, or any other difference or identifier. The idea here is that there is always room, and that relationships drive EVERYTHING that happens there.
This is where I think HCC differs from a lot of non-profits, which tend to be driven heavily by metrics (required for funding, I get it) and focused on the task of substantiating their own existence in the world. Food banks, as I’ve mentioned before, are often engaged in the work of procuring and giving out food, not in lifting people out of poverty. In this way, HCC feels like a living, breathing entity that adapts and changes to meet the needs of the community, while trying to attack the root causes of why people are poor or in crisis to begin with.
Check out this very basic video I threw together with the help of Kathleen Kuo at Nevada Humanities, and my niece, award-winning film student, Anise Atwell. This is super rough and not super pretty - we kind of threw a camera in a room - but the women speaking in this video illustrate the importance of people as our most important resource.
Let’s focus on these ideas and the quotes from these women:
Welcoming / No shame, no blame.
It’s the people that make you feel welcomed, like this is all okay. You don’t feel like you shouldn’t be there.
Curiosity + Empathy for Others.
Everyone wanted to talk to me, to know me… they just cared and wanted to make sure we were okay.
Trust that People will Do the Right Things for Themselves.
I felt supported by my community, which wasn’t where we were from, but they just welcomed us. They said: We’ll help you. We’ll point you in the right direction. We believe in you. And they did so, without me having to prove myself or pay anybody anything…. And we thrived.
People Do Better Together, than alone.
I don’t know where I’d be without the kindness of others. Help without expectations. Somebody was always right there holding me up.
Equity / To Be Supported + To Support:
Whatever it is that kept me hanging on, I want to give that to other people.
When Rikki finds herself and her kids homeless, after fleeing a destructive marriage, it isn’t the food donations that changes her life, the food boxes she stands in line for, the programs she applies for, it’s the way she is received and raised up by the people she meets at HCC. It’s the way she is able to go from unhoused to housed because one person gifts her a trailer, and another offers to sell her land, while holding the mortage, making it possible for her to bypass credit agencies and banks, an impossible hurdle for people in trying to get out of poverty.
Those things happened for her because the driving force of the organization is forming relationships.
What truly makes Rikki feel supported isn’t just the physical things she has now. It’s the intangible truth she knows - that no matter what happens next, she will never have to fall that far again. That she isn’t alone this time.
Somebody will be there to hold her up.
Perhaps this is the new “charity” we all need. A culture of forming relationships and webs, instead of silos, of social capital. But can it be intentionally built into the engine of our community organizations?
I don’t know, but we all would be better off if we could make it happen.
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END NOTES:
So much fun to meet some great people in Northern Nevada, including having my first Basque dinner (oxtails) complete with Picon Punch - Thank you Kathleen and Allan!
There was chopping a lot of tomatoes and zucchini, for ratatouille - Thanks for the knives and cutting board, Christina! - in the hotel room while watching a Shark Tank marathon and then storing it all, with the pork butt for the posole, in the green vintage-looking mini-fridge under the desk - Thank you, Quest, for cooking that pork into submission and to Marcia and Steve for the hocks. You guys and Connie, my spirit cook in the kitchen, made a brilliant posole.
Look how we all made shit happen!
I enoyed the extended road trips through The Rurals with Kathleen where we raged at all PhD programs, counted front yard political signs and discovered Moondance Chocolates at the Brewery Arts Center in Carson City, where we ate our weight in sample chocolates, before buying a couple boxes. I am so grateful to travel with you because people give you free chocolate and you are clearly the “airport dad” in this relationship.
Was chuffed to meet Nevada Poet Laureate, Shaun Griffin, at the HCC meeting, whose work teaching writing to incarcerated men, is featured at the now-decommissioned Nevada Sate Prison exhibit, Far Beyond The Walls, which is so worth doing the curated tour. It will stay with you.
The term used widely now for solitary confinement, the hole, originated there. It’s a pain monument, for sure. This poem, written by one of Griffin’s students in prison, lingers.
Still with me - the young writers at University of Reno, who were smart and curious and eager to get-the-fuck-started. I’m not gonna lie - they made me remember a lot of things about just starting out as a writer. And they made me miss teaching at university.
Mostly, thanks for every conversation, connection, text, email, hug, every private story, every little memoir of your life you whispered to me when it was just us. I’m still carrying those stories around. And will for awhile.
Thank you, as always, for reading. xo