Finding Connection, Purpose, and Community

Episode 73, 40 min listen

In this episode, we’ll hear about one person’s journey to nurture connection and community in their hometown and about using Civic Saturdays as a vehicle to bring people together. Along the way, we’ll explore stories and insights that remind us all just how important a sense of community can be. We’ll also share a few ideas about what we can do to foster and grow community in our own backyard.

AUDIO PLAYER

You can access this episode wherever you listen to podcasts via our pod.link.

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES

Learn more about Citizen University and see if Civic Saturdays are right for your community. You might even find, as I did, that there is someone in your town who has already been through the Civic Saturday Fellowship program.

Hear how another guest, Shamichael Hallman, hosted Civic Saturdays at their local library branch.

Learn more about the Aspen Institute's program Weave: The Social Fabric Project.

Learn about Braver Angels and see if your community has a chapter.

Read the book Michael mentioned: The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks.

Check out the NC Civic Health Index.

Michael mentioned some other partners who helped him with Civic Saturday. Here are links to a few of them:

If Michael's friend LB Prevette sounds like someone you'd like to meet or learn more about, you might enjoy this NPR interview with her from podcast Southbound. She talks about her life, her work with Weave, and her experience of being a smart, hillbilly, queer, community builder. I love this quote from the interview.

"I constantly hear how hard it must be to be queer in Wilkes County. I find it way harder to be a hillbilly in academic elite spaces." - LB Prevette

Back in 2016 NYTimes did a feature article on Wilkes County in North Carolina.

We didn't get a chance to talk about Michael's day job, but you can use the following link to learn more about the work of NC Child.

MICHAEL COOPER'S BIO

Michael Cooper serves as the Senior Director of Advocacy for NC Child. Before that he practiced law in the courtroom, worked as a journalist, and served as a Government Affairs Director for the NC Association of Realtors®. Michael is a Community Advisor for Weave: The Social Fabric Project at the Aspen Institute, a board member for Wilkes Recovery Revolution, and was a 2020 Presidential Leadership Scholar, a fellowship hosted by the George W. Bush Center, the Clinton Center, the George & Barbara Bush Foundation, and the LBJ Foundation. He is currently an Obama USA 2024-2025 Leader.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

-Introduction

Ame Sanders 00:11

This is the State of Inclusion Podcast, where we explore topics at the intersection of equity, inclusion, and community. In each episode, we meet people who are changing their communities for the better, and we discover actions that each of us can take to improve our own communities. I'm Ame Sanders. Welcome.

If you've followed our State of Inclusion podcast for a while, or maybe you've subscribed to our newsletter, The Inclusive Community, then you know that we often talk about the conditions that are necessary for communities to become more inclusive and equitable. We talk about what we call the practice of Groundwork. That's the idea of preparing the community soil for the seeds of equity and inclusion to be able to take root and grow. One of the important aspects of groundwork is about nurturing community and bridging across differences. In this time of polarization, finding ways to build community trust and connection is so important. If that interests you, you're going to love this episode.

In today's episode, we'll hear about one person's journey to nurture connection and community in their hometown. Along the way, we'll explore stories and insights that remind us all just how important a sense of community can be. We'll also share a few ideas about what we can do to foster and grow community in our own backyard. So today, we are happy to welcome Michael Cooper. Michael is the Senior Director of Advocacy with NC Child, based in Raleigh, North Carolina. But most importantly for our discussion today, Michael is a community builder. So welcome, Michael. Thanks for joining us.

Michael Cooper 02:02

Thank you for having me.

-The Meaning of Community

Ame Sanders 02:04

So maybe the best place to start, Michael, is to talk about, what does community mean to you?

Michael Cooper 02:10

That is a wonderful question. And you know, I think like any good story, we should start at the beginning. And so, you know, I grew up in a pretty great community. I grew up in the foothills of North Carolina, a small town up there in the country. My family, both sides of my family, had been in the area for generations, and so, you know, all the aunts and uncles and cousins were around. You would go to family reunions, and there'd be 100 people at the family reunion. You know, so big families back then. It was a place where everybody's parents had grown up together and gone to high school together. So, everybody's families knew one another.

We were a company town, so a large percentage of the population the community where I lived worked for the same company. They would holiday together. They would see each other on trips and everything like that. There were a lot of bonds, a lot of civic bonds from that, and a strong sense of community. It was sort of a time and a place where there was a church on every street corner. In our family, we would go to church twice a week. We would go on Wednesday night. We would go on Sunday morning. There'd be a fellowship meal in the fellowship hall after church on Sunday morning. So, there were a lot of opportunities to find community.

I don't think that growing up, I knew what it was. It was just something that happened. It was just something that you were instinctively already a part of. It was ingrained in how we were living. So, I was very fortunate. My family was very involved in community. My mom was a school teacher. She was involved in the education system, and then she left teaching to open a bookstore, to open a used bookstore on main street of our town. She had that bookstore for 36 years, Browse About Book Exchange. But because our bookstore was on main street of the community, we were right in the heart of the town, and so right next to us was the movie theater. So, you had families, young people, coming in and out of the theater constantly, particularly on Saturdays.

Then, on the other side was basically a form of public housing. It. It had once been a historic hotel in our community, and now it was public housing. A lot of working-class folks lived there, and they would come in. Because it was a used bookstore, it was a great convenient place for them to be able to come in and shop. So, I grew up getting to know and meeting a lot of people who would come from, you know, from that housing next door. So, you know, built a lot of relationships and knew everybody in town. And then my very first job was delivering newspapers door-to-door downtown. So, I knew all the shop owners in town. I would go in, and I would deliver, and I'd sell the newspaper. So, I knew everybody, and I grew up around them. For me, that was just that was a part of life. There was never any sort of deeper, philosophical meaning to it.

But then, as I got older, you know, I had a reason to reflect on what these things mean and the importance of community because our community faced a little bit of some challenge. We were very successful in the 20th century. We thrived and prospered in the 20th century. We had some of the largest furniture manufacturing companies in United States. We had the corporate headquarters for Lowe's Home Improvement. During the 1990s, they moved their headquarters away. And so, a lot of jobs left with that. Then, a lot of the furniture manufacturers closed down or jobs left town. And so, this vibrant community that I'd grown up in started to feel the impact of--the shopping mall closed down. It wasn't what it used to be. Some of the small businesses that we knew were closing down.

-Climbing the Second Mountain

So, when I was in high school, I started to think, "Okay, it is a small town. My dreams and aspirations are bigger than this. I want to go off, and I want to go to college." That was what young people were taught around that time, was go off and succeed and a find a path somewhere else. So, that's what I was sort of pursuing. So, I had big dreams to go off and go somewhere else, and I didn't have a feeling like I was going to return home. I didn't prioritize community. I don't know if you know the book Second Mountain by David Brooks, but he talks about there are sort of two mountains in life. The first mountain is the sort of the fame, success, wealth that people chase. But the second mountain is the better mountain, and that's family and community and relationships and faith and purpose and things like that.

Well, you know, I tried to climb mountain number one, and had some decent success at it over time, but completely ignored mountain number two and the importance of those institutions, even though I maybe took them for granted. I'd had them when I was growing up, but something changed a little bit in my life. So, this was Appalachia. It's small town western North Carolina, where I was growing up and graduated high school in 2004 and this was the beginning of something that we've now come to know as the opioid crisis. Well, when it started, my friends and I, we didn't know what that was, but what was happening was a lot of a lot of people who were out of work or maybe underemployed were able to find sort of a black market to get prescriptions and then sell them locally. I'm a teenager around that time. My friends and I, we were having a good time, maybe partying on the weekends. Now, suddenly, there was access to some additional recreational drugs. So, a lot of my generation experimented, tried it out and then dealt with it in a lot of different ways. I was not immune to that. So, my best friends and I all went through that around 2005, 2006, 2007.

I went to college nearby--Appalachian State University. Great college. Go mountaineers. But it was close by to where I lived. So, when I was in college, I was studying journalism but having a good time. So, I was close by to what was going on with that, with the opioid crisis. So, I went through it and started recreationally, and then battled substance use disorder, and hit bottom few years later in 2011 when I was in law school. That was a hard time in my life. I was very lucky because I had a support system. I had a stable, loving household that I grew up in. I had parents that cared a lot about me, and they were there to pick me up when I needed help, and forgave me. Gave me a chance to get back on my feet. I had friends and a community that helped me get through that. I was very lucky. I was in law school at the time, and so I was able to finish school and graduate and pass the bar exam. Then I came back home to the town that I'm from, North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and realized how fortunate that I'd been, and I realized the value of those institutions and community and support systems and close-knit bonds. Because I met a lot of people in the court system who weren't as fortunate, I wasn't any better than they were. My story wasn't very different, but I was lucky because I had some certain things in my life that maybe some people didn't. Maybe they grew up in a single-parent household. Maybe they grew up with lesser means. My dad was in business. My mom had a small business, and so I was very fortunate, and that taught me a lot of things about how important these things are.

There's thinking now that the opposite of addiction is not necessarily like sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection and community. I found that in my own life, and so that's opened windows of my thinking of we need these sorts of things, particularly in places like where I'm from. We need community there. We need to rebuild those bonds, some of the bonds that we've lost, but as a country, we need that too because, with all we've lived through with the pandemic and different things like that, we need each other. We're seeing this crisis of loneliness and isolation and mental health, and so we need to find ways to reconnect with one another. One of the first things I mentioned there's large family gatherings, reunions. I don't know that families do that anymore, to that extent, where we're together with 100 people from our extended family, like that, and we need to find ways to recreate that.

Ame Sanders 10:53

So, I love your response. It touched on so many different themes about community, and I just want to bring out a few of those and make sure that I heard those correctly. One thing that your discussion about growing up reminded me of the kind of joke about the fish swimming in water. Basically, somebody says something that has the water today, and the fish says, "What water?" You know, because he doesn't realize he's swimming in water. It sounded like your childhood, that community was like that for you. It was something that surrounded you and supported you and gave you place and life, but that you took for granted or didn't even realize was there.

Then you talk about it in terms of family and big extended family, but also your friends and connections that you made with people in the community, both personally and even with the paper route or with your mom's business, professionally and from an economic standpoint. And then I heard you also talk about community as a sense of vibrancy and sense of place, and how that can wax and wane over time with what's happening in the environment and happening to people in the community, and then also perhaps happening to you personally as you go through that. But then I also I loved hearing you talk about community as a safety net and as people around you who loved you in spite of and through challenges that you may have faced.

So, there's so many rich themes in the description that you just gave us about what community means to you, and I'm glad that you started that way because it opens at least my perspective on this discussion of community. So, thank you for sharing all of that. So, I guess the next question I would have for you, then, with all of that as a backdrop, what does community building mean to you then?

-The Meaning of Community Building

Michael Cooper 12:48

Well, that's a great question. You know, I love the things that you pulled out of that story. So, to reflect back on that, I don't know if you've ever seen the TV show Stranger Things about these young kids growing up. My childhood in the 80s was very similar to that. It was a neighborhood where you knew all the families around you. So, I had all my friends living down the street. We rode bikes, we played in the woods, so we had that. My mom was the youngest of nine children, so there were eight different aunts and uncles, and their families all lived nearby. She grew up on a farm not far from where I grew up. So, a lot of the family still lived around the farm. So, there was a place. There was a destination. There was a cemetery on the hillside above the farm with graves going back to the early 1800s. So, this has been a place in the family for many years where people lived and found a connection to one another. So, that was really important.

But you know, so what does community building mean? And I think that over time, I realized there's things that, like you said, I took for granted. I think we've lived through a time where we've seen declining trust in our institutions across the board, media, business, government, things like that. Then at the local level, there's sort of that disconnect. We'd had these institutions that were built many years ago. You know, the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis Club, you know, the different things that you know locally in my hometown, but maybe the participation in them had kind of dwindled. Then that church on every street corner, maybe those congregations were getting smaller.

Then, I noticed in my own life, I wasn't going to church twice a week, I was going to church more, sometimes closer to twice a year. So, I was losing that community in my life, and I was having to find those places. I spent several years back home practicing law, but then went off and took some jobs and worked in Raleigh, North Carolina, worked in government and did some other things, and now I work for a nonprofit. I've found it sometimes a little bit more of a challenge to find community in some bigger areas. Sometimes, living in a city, there's a lot more people around, and there's less privacy, but more anonymity. That's not always great. So, you go into a grocery store, you go into a coffee shop, nobody knows you. Well, there's some good things that come with that sometimes, but not always.

So, I missed--you know, back home in my hometown, there was a really great local coffee shop, Anchor Coffee and great folks who founded that, and it's a community hub. It's a place where, when you go in there, you know everybody in there, and so you're catching up, and you're able to tell jokes and tell stories and catch up with people. That's harder to do in a bigger city where you know there may be several people in the coffee shop, but you don't know them. You don't interact with them. You got your headphones on. You're doing your work on your laptop. So, I've thought about how can we find ways, in today's day and age, to restore those bonds that I grew up with as hard as they are.

Then there's the greater context. There's the moment that we're living in. There's a lot that's gone on in the country in the last 10-15, years, and so all that's going on around us. So, I've been interested in that. I've tried to get involved in programs like Aspen Institute has their Weave: The Social Fabric Project. And there's this program Braver Angels, which tries to bring people together across the divide. I grew up in an area, a very culturally conservative area, and there's and there's a lot of great that comes from that. Then I went off to college, and I got connected to a lot of people who are more culturally progressive, and there's a lot of good that can come from that as well. It seems like in recent years, we've been being pulled in more and more in different directions. So, the folks that I grew up with, friends and family that I grew up with, may have certain views, and then friends that I've gotten to know in college and law school and work and different things like that over the years, maybe have different views. But it's harder and harder for folks to talk to one another. I saw this in recent years around election season for the last 4, 8, 10 years. If I put something on Facebook, I might have friends and family arguing in the comment section about something on Facebook. I don't want to start that. I don't want that to go off in that way.

So, I've been thinking and reflecting about, well, how do we get folks to talk to one another in a more healthy fashion. That's been an interest of mine. So, community building is about just giving people spaces to find people who care about them, to find connection, and to find purpose outside of themselves, is what it means to me. I've been very fortunate to be a part of some of those efforts, and I know you probably want to touch on that. But you know it's very important in this day and age.

Ame Sanders 17:45

So, you touched on a number of things, Michael, that I want to revisit and get in a little bit deeper about. You talked about the divide that we have around some of our different beliefs around culture. And one of the things that I know that you did in Raleigh, I really want to talk a little bit about is your Civic Saturday program. Because that came up in another interview that I did recently. So, I would love to hear your story about how you guys in Raleigh did Civic Saturday--what it looked like for you, how you created it, how you feel about it having done it.

-Civic Saturday Raleigh

Michael Cooper 18:18

So, if you don't know about them, Civic Saturdays is a program put on by Citizen University, which was founded by a guy named Eric Liu, who used to be a White House speechwriter back in the 90s. Very civically minded person, the son of immigrants, cares very deeply about this country, and our civics and our civic life. So, he was looking for a way to get us to have healthy conversations about civics. There's a difference between politics and civics. Politics are those issues and everything like that, but civics are sort of how we interact and our duties and obligations of being a citizen. They do this work through Citizen University. They have different programs, but one of them is the Civic Saturday program.

What a Civic Saturday is, is kind of like an analog to a faith gathering. So, it's very similar to what goes on Sunday, but it goes on Saturday, and the purpose of it is to bring people together around our civic faith, as opposed to our religious faith. So, the format is very similar. People come together in a venue. There's music, there's food, there's fellowship, there's talking, but it's focused on civics and things we can do together. But you go to it, it feels very similar to what you might do on a Sunday. To backtrack a little bit, I want to say that in 2018, the Aspen Institute and David Brooks (who I mentioned with that book) had this program, Weave: The Social Fabric Project, focused on building social trust in America. They did a road tour. They went to like a like a dozen places across the United States, a place in Nebraska, Baltimore, Texas, different places. Very randomly, they came to our town. And to their credit, when they came, they weren't as interested in what had gone wrong. They were more interested in people who were rebuilding or who were doing something right. There's great resilience that comes through when you go through some challenging times. Sometimes, there's great resilience that comes from it. Hard times can teach you character and wisdom and empathy. There was a lot of that if you look and talk to people. There's that, I think it's an Ernest Hemingway quote, "The world breaks everyone, but afterwards, some are stronger at the broken places" sort of thing.

Well, there was great resilience in people like Devin, who was a high school classmate who founded a recovery center for folks going through substance use disorder, and she had this remarkable story. She'd gone through the issue herself. She'd lost everything, got back on her feet, got her family back, and then founded this organization doing incredible work. My friend Laura Beth Privette. I'm from the country, but LB is the country. She grew up on a chicken farm, but she also came out as LGBT in high school, and that was very hard for her around that time. I think it was around 2008. She's in high school, and so she probably wanted to build a future somewhere else and wasn't going to come back either. But her father died unexpectedly of a heart attack. So, she grew up on this farm, and suddenly, she had to come back to help keep the farm going. She fell back in love with her hometown and wanted to focus on the good things about our community. So, she was one of the people that, Weave came to town and talked to people and met people you know, was inspired by her story books like that. So, they stayed in touch.

Then in 2019 they had this big gathering the Aspen Institute put on, Weave put on, in Washington, DC. I think it was called Weave the People. So, a handful of us from Wilkes County went up to it, and were part of the gathering. So, they brought together all these people from all these places that they met. Then, they also used the Rolodex. So, you might have some person from a big foundation sitting at a table with just people doing good in their own backyard. So, it was a great way of building connections. But one of the speakers at that event was Eric Liu from Citizen University. So, I saw him speak, and I was like, "Well, I'm really interested in this. I love that." So, I wanted to do it. They do a program called a Civic Saturday Fellowship. So, I went through the fellowship and learned how to do Civic Saturdays.

I did two of them in Wilkes in 2021 and then when I came to Raleigh for work in 2023, I wanted to put down civic roots. You know, I'm 38 years old. I thought, well how does a guy in his late 30s get acclimated in community? I don't just want to live here. I want to be a part of it. So, I thought, well, there's an idea. So, I was finding a faith community. I was finding friends. I got part of a dinner party group. All good things. Trying to focus on that second mountain of life--the family, community, relationships. But I wanted to do something civic. So, I was like, "Well, I know how to do that. Let's do one of these here." So, I had this crazy idea to do it after the election. Two weeks after the election. I thought, why not? That'd be a fitting time to bring people together, This last election, 2024. So, we did it November, 2024 on a Saturday, two weeks after the election. I got connected to a guy who's now a great buddy, Chris West. We wanted to bring people together from across the divide and see who is going to help me get folks in there as well. So, we put it on, and we got some local organizations to put their name on it and support it. The Institute for Emerging Issues at NC State, the Institute for Political Leadership in North Carolina, which is a fellowship program for aspiring political leaders. America's future, which is a program for young conservatives. We wanted to have conservatives in the room, and they were supportive. And Braver Angels was supportive as well. And the local Alliance, the local chapter of Braver Angels, was very supportive and was a part of it, and brought people to it.

So, we were able to have different organizations support it and bring people in. Then, Leslie Garvin, she's great. She runs the North Carolina Center for Campus Engagement. She presented the North Carolina Civic Health Index, which came out in 2024. It's our first one in about 10 years, talking about how our civic health is doing in North Carolina. She presented it. We had food. We had some music, we had speakers, and we had table conversations facilitated by Braver Angels. It was a great day of civics, focused not on the election but on what do we do now? How can we work together? What do we have in common? Let's focus on North Carolina and focus on the local level. So, we had over 70 people show up on a Saturday. We had Republicans and Democrats in the crowd and on the program. We had elected officials. We had all sorts of people. So, it was great, and I'm looking forward to what it can lead to.

People who may be interested in doing another one, I'll probably find another way to do one in 2025. I learned a lot from doing it, but it was a great gathering. I encourage folks to check those out. There are different programs like that. There's the Listen First Project, which is run by a friend here in North Carolina, Pearce Godwin, and they're worth checking out. Braver Angels, Citizen University, the Weave program. There are programs like that are focused on getting people talking. It's not about changing your mind or about changing somebody else's mind, but it's about trying to understand one another across to today's divides, which are cultural and education and race and politics and things like that.

Ame Sanders 26:06

Wow. First, you introduced us to a number of organizations that I'll include links to in the show notes. Community building--and I think we all know this implicitly--community building is a team sport. It is not something you do by yourself or you make happen by yourself. Community comes from the things we all do together across our community. So, you touched on this a little bit, but maybe you could talk a bit about this. How do you think about bringing people together, and how did you bring a group of people together that held very different perspectives? How did you make sure that your group represented the diversity that's in your community?

-You Need Partners

Michael Cooper 26:48

Yeah, this is not easy, and I don't know that we did it perfectly. I think it was about building trust and reaching out. I think it was focusing on, alright we're going to talk about things that maybe we can agree on, that we're excited about. I found in having trying to have conversations with folks who disagree with you, you don't start with the big issue. You don't start with climate change or gun violence or things like that. You start with, where'd you grow up? What do you like to do for fun? Those sorts of things. You build rapport with people, and then at the end of a 30-minute conversation, then you might get into it. But by that point, you already understand where the person comes from anyway. It's almost like you don't even have to get into the because you'll understand why they think the way that they do, why they have a certain value or a viewpoint. But if you start with those things, and then you build a connection.

I think we were lucky. We were able to find some organizations that kind of helped us. Braver Angels already had sort of a built-in constituency of folks, red and blue, who were active in their programming, who were able to come. My friend Chris, who was a co-organizer of the event, was able to pull in conservatives because he knew conservatives, and he was able to pull in folks in that world. So, I think it's hard, it's not easy to do. I know that there were probably people who did not come to that program because they were like, "Well, there's going to be people who don't agree with me or don't value my perspective in that room. So, I don't want to come." I mean, that's, that's fair, and I understand it. It was kind of raw two weeks after an election to do something like that. But I think it was worth it, and I think it can hopefully be a framework for other gatherings and other conversations like that. So we'll see.

-NC Civic Health Index

Ame Sanders 28:31

The Civic Health Index, that intrigued me. This idea that you might actually measure what many of us that you might measure, the water we've been talking about right the water that's around us in community, and how you could assess that, because it sometimes may feel unmeasurable. What did you learn from the civic health index that you didn't know about your community? And what did it tell you?

Michael Cooper 28:54

In looking at it, I dove through it when it came out. A big credit to Leslie, who was a part of it and so many other people. I think Chris Cooper from western North Carolina, no relation. Kevin Marinelli, who works for the UNC Center for Public Discourse, he's a part of some other folks from academia, released the report. It kind of confirmed things that maybe we were already feeling. If the Civic Health Index would say, North Carolina gets an A++ on all the issues, that would have been surprising. But it was more mixed results about, yeah, there's some things that you're doing okay. There are also some areas that need work. You know, it's interesting. We've had extremely high voter turnout the last few election cycles, but high voter turnout doesn't necessarily equate to healthy democracy, in other words. So, the more people engage in politics, the more challenging things seem to get.

So, there are there are things besides politics. It's important for folks to vote, to register to vote, to exercise your voice, but there are other things. Those things are like volunteering, getting to know your neighbors, donating to charity, and issues like that. So, the Civic Health Index looked at a lot of those things, and, not surprisingly, said, "You know what? We need a little bit of work on those things." Outside of the civics itself, that sort of it checks with what we're seeing with other issues. Americans have fewer friends than they did generations ago. Younger Americans are less likely to date. Teenagers and young adults are less likely to be in a relationship than they were generations ago. They're more single parent households and fewer marriages and stuff like that. People have fewer friends and see those friends less often. So, not surprisingly, civic health is tied to that in a way.

Some of those trends are concerning, particularly for the younger generation. You see that show up with Gen Z, who some of these trends are probably the least likely to volunteer or to donate to a charity or things like that. Part of that is just being young and not as engaged yet. But I think that that's something that we'll have to think about. We need to instill that in young people because, people like us, Ame, we know better. Maybe because we grew up at a time where we felt like there was a great sense of community or civic trust. But if young people are growing up today and they don't have that, then they don't know better, and they won't work at it, to try to fix and correct it. So, it's on the adults of today to set a good example for young people. So, we do have some work to do to get out there and encourage people to be active citizens again.

I think parts of life are cyclical. I grew up in a place where we did so well economically in the 20th century, and then maybe we took it for granted, and the jobs went away, and we went through some challenges. But now we've developed resilience. We remember how important those institutions are. So, the next 20, 30, 40 years are going to be great. We're going to build new things and do new things. I like to think that maybe, like, that's going to be America's example, as well as. Sort of America had such a great economy and did so well. In the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s where it was a great time to be alive, a great time to grow up. Then there was 9/11 and the war and the economic recession and things like that and so. Then there was a pandemic, and we lived through that. So, we've lived through some challenging times. But maybe that's reminded us, hopefully, long term, about the things that really matter in life. I'm short-term, not pessimistic, but short-term realistic, and then long-term optimistic. But above all, I'm hopeful. I've learned recently that there is a difference between hope and optimism because hope has something to do with also you playing a role in that as well. So, I'm trying to be hopeful and trying to give myself reasons to be hopeful.

-Looking Back and Looking Forward

Ame Sanders 32:44

You talk about being hopeful and involving yourself in solutions as well. So, the question want to ask you is, for yourself, what are the things that you see in the future, and what advice would you give to listeners who also are seeing similar things in their own community?

Michael Cooper 33:05

I love that. What I'm looking forward to, I think that the coming months and years are going to be this time of experimentation and new ideas and new institutions. I love history. When I was growing up in that bookstore, my mom's bookstore on Main Street, I was big nonfiction reader. So, I read a lot of history. Loved it, biography and history and everything like that. I think a lot of us are trying to think, "Well, you know what we're going through today, what is this like? Is this like the Civil War? Is this like the 1960s" We find certain commonalities with it. But, I look back, and I'm like, it really sounds a whole lot like the turn of the last century, where, you know, the sort of the 1890s and the early 20th century, and there were a lot of growing pains. There was a lot of populism, and there were a lot of different movements and social movements and everything like that. A lot of rambunctious politics, to put it mildly.

But at the same time, there were a lot of lot of people out there building clubs, building institutions. You know, you look at all the sort of the big clubs and national organizations that exist today, they were founded around that time. People were trying new things, and people were getting involved. Women got the right to vote and there were civic social movements and everything like that. I think today's time is a very similar time where instead of a of a change from agriculture to industry, now we're living through the service economy and digital and online and all that stuff. There are growing pains. Media is going through changes, and it's going to take us a while to make sense of. But I think that we can all find a way to do something.

So, there are a dozen things we've talked about with community building and social trust. I'm really excited about what those will do. I mean Weave and Braver Angels and Civic Saturdays. I hope people hear me as an evangelist for those programs and go and maybe get involved or find something similar in their own backyard. But my advice is to try something and do something. It's not on you to save the world, but it is on you to be involved and to be an active citizen. People talk about the greatest generation a lot. Well, the greatest generation didn't know they were great at the time. They grew up in a very challenging time, the Great Depression and World War Two, but they were able to get involved and do certain things.

I'm a millennial. We get a bad rap. I know Gen Z certainly gets a bad rap sometimes, but I am hopeful about them because I do think they are very passionate about issues and about, where they live and about, inclusion, and about making sure that everybody has a voice. So, I think that if you can turn that into building, into community building and civic building, I think that it can really do something very powerful. Get out and meet people who are different from yourself. I've been very fortunate to get to know people from around the country and around the world. I love visiting friends, and it's so fascinating. I think that would be so helpful for our country, because it was after World War Two when you had that sort of booming age, and America doing great things. People had gone to war or they were serving together on the home front with people they didn't know, and they built trust because they were forced to build trust. That was around for a couple of generations, and I think we need to get that back of being around people very different from ourselves and understanding why they think the way that they think. Hopefully, we'll find opportunities to serve and give back. So, I think that's really important.

But I think we can all do better about just getting involved in our own backyard, making time for friends, making time for family. That extended family is out there. The cousins and aunts and uncles and everything like that, they're there, but I think that maybe we keep up with them on Facebook. When's the last time we sort of went to a big gathering where there were a bunch of people, bringing pot luck and reading potluck with each other? I miss those days, and I think that we need to go out of our way to try to get them back.

Ame Sanders 37:14

Well, Michael, thank you so much for the discussion and the time today and for joining us.

Michael Cooper 37:19

Thank you so much.

-Conclusion

Ame Sanders 37:24

Wow. So, Michael is a great storyteller and community builder, and he shared so much wisdom with us. One key takeaway for me was the idea that community is like a fish swimming in water. You may not recognize or appreciate its importance until it's gone. Yet, unlike a fish, we each have the ability to contribute to and nurture a healthy sense of community wherever we find ourselves. Michael mentioned a lot of great community building organizations and resources, and I've included links for those in the show notes. Perhaps there will be something in there that will help you in your work of building community in your own backyard.

If the idea of Civic Saturdays interests you like it does me, you might also want to listen to my recent interview with Shamichael Hallman, Meet Me at the Library. In that episode, you can hear how she Michael also brought Civic Saturdays to the Cossitt Library in Memphis, Tennessee.

This has been the State of Inclusion podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, the best compliment for our work is your willingness to share the podcast or discuss these ideas with others. If you'd like to hear more about the practice of building an inclusive and equitable community, head over to theinclusivecommunity.com and sign up for our newsletter. Also, feel free to leave us a review or reach out. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks so much for listening and join us again next time you

CONTRIBUTORS

Guest: Michael Cooper

Host: Ame Sanders

Social Media and Marketing Coordinator: Kayla Nelson

Podcast Coordinator: Emma Winiski

Sound: Uros Nikolic