Giant Steps?

The Community Council met again last Thursday evening. After three meetings in which the primary question seemed to be ‘Who else should be here?’, this meeting began with none of the original members present for the meeting. So, right away, we knew who else was supposed to be there. As it turned out, all five of the missing were missing for different reasons, but there I was, for the first half hour, the institutional memory at this meeting which featured four or five new people, the other ‘who elses’ we had been so anxious to gather. The institutional memory had people at hand but no agenda. (By the end of that first half hour or so, two other people who had each attended a previous meeting or two finally showed up. We had also been joined, on time, by a reporter from the newspaper, further making me wince at the disarray.)

Suffice to say, I was experiencing a certain level of irritation at having been left in this particular lurch. I had attended two of the three previous meetings, but at no point had there been any general agreement about what the group might do once everybody who was supposed to be collected had appeared. The new collectees were pretty gung-ho; happy to be invited, they wanted to know when the events were to begin. I didn’t know; didn’t even know what events might be on offer.

Because there is a certain repetitiveness syndrome that all meetings engender, we began with asking who else, other than the missing founders, should be there? We made yet another list: it had not been enough either to offer an invitation in the newspaper to Point Roberts’ groups, nor to send a general purpose invitation by email to groups across the Point. Now, it behooved us to actually talk in person in some way to each group to get them to sign up for something: become a member or at least name a liaison.

Of course, since none of the original people were there, neither were any of the previously-constructed lists, so we did it yet again. And then, we considered adjourning so that next month there would be enough more who elses to keep us from having to repeat item again. But it occurred to me that we might as well use the remaining hour to decide at this meeting, what we would do at the next meeting when hail, hail, the gang was at last all here. Otherwise, I was afraid that we'd start the next meeting by addressing the question of who else ought to be coming to the meetings.

I proposed that we offer some general project that would be used as an exercise for the group to begin thinking about how it would actually do something. I emphasized that it wouldn’t have to be something that the group would, in fact, have to be committed to. Rather, it was a kind of practice piece. The reason for this, from my perspective, was that, if we tried first to select a serious project, the meetings would decline into months of arguing about what was the most worthy project. In the process, the group would fall apart from divisiveness, discouragement, and despair. By contrast, starting with a specific idea might end up eventually--I was thinking maybe after a couple of months of meetings--with either some commitment to the original idea or to some other idea that was generated along the way.

Somebody pointed out that we needed a much better community center, indeed a different community center with a different building. Someone else countered that the community center we’ve got could be better used, particularly it could be used to create more sense of community. From there, the discussion suddenly centered on how the community center might be used in a different way, might be made to be more inviting. (The Community Center currently houses the library, two adjoining largish meeting rooms (one of which has a small stage/platform area), kitchen facilities, a small office and storage room, and a computer center.) From the community center, the discussion moved to the community events sign, up at the end of the street which announces, awkwardly, what’s going on and which, according to those who use it, was falling apart.

By the end of the second hour, there were several work groups in place to carry out preparations for redesigning and rebuilding the community events sign, to figure out how to get the community involved in a kind of ‘extreme 24-hour Community Center makeover,’ and to think about how the Community Center and the community at large could be more directly involved in this August’s 100th Anniversary of Homesteading in Point Roberts. After several months of near stasis, suddenly the group was jumping ahead.

It wasn’t going to be an exercise or a practice session. It was like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland were right there with us, saying, “Let’s do the show right here!” It was definitely an up-with-people kind of moment. What’s to become of it all? Stay tuned, month by month.