For the past year, I’ve blocked out Wednesday mornings to write this newsletter. I missed this week, because my brain was overloaded and needed fewer responsibilities for few days. However, lots of things were still happening, because that’s how things work around here. Always a little loopy.
Last night, I had a group of parents come to my house to discuss the very topic of this newsletter – post-high school plans for people with disabilities. I borrowed folding chairs and extended the dining room table with a folding table. I organized speakers and set up a hybrid option, so some people could participate from home. The meeting lasted for four hours.
Read more at The Great Leap, my newsletter
Apt. 11d 
These are great tips.
I think this comment is topical to this post although I’m leaping from your comments in the last one.
On a very basic personal level, when I switched from digital media to running around doing payroll, inventory, and customer service stuff as well as buying toilet paper, it was humbling. When you get on the ground in front line work, things do change. I feel at ground level, and there’s good and bad to that. Fun: Black Belt ceremonies. Not fun: keyholder calls in “sick” (hungover) and I have to race to open the door at 7:45 am Saturday. And when I get there the toilet is broken.
But I’m really glad I did it.
I probably go on about it too much but the world is actually different at the ground level, at least for me. I have much more hope because I don’t see the stats, I see people and I…to be all Louis Armstrong about it…watch them grow.
So cheering you on in your thoughts about creating local networks, possibly with a physical home and programs. For me, there is something almost spiritual about that kind of grassroots, hands-on community building. And it’s amazing how there’s always someone to help you out, even if you’re a bit late opening the door.
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Totally agree. There’s something so fulfilling about the real life world after years of being just a brain on a screen.
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I read this newsletter thinking, my, Laura is amazing. And you are. I am glad you are there.
And I also agree about “grassroots, hands-on community building” being an essential, life affirming, world building act of greatness.
Yesterday, I dropped in on the sewing workshop for the neighborhood for the organization I volunteer for (significant “pillar”: “providing a transition to an economically stable future for immigrant & refugee women”). There was joy and food and community and diversity and hope. The group has transitioned to paid staff & the executive director gets a salary. But, it started the way that you are describing, a strong woman drawing on her personal committment and friends.
Watching the organization transform over the last couple of years gave me one additional insight: press, and positive press of hope is something that everyone is looking for and it draws so many people in. The newsletter you wrote has that hope in it and you know how to tell this story. It’s marketing, but the marketing of hope, the possibility of doing something positive is a big draw for supporters and donors. And, that money means hiring people to write grants, expand, pay people and to draw the attention of politicians.
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