A 2025 starter: Community, connections and the things that connect us

I am spending time in 2025 working on two things.

Exploring ways my experience might contribute to community, learning and progress at a very local level outside of formal organizations. Think: City, neighborhood, apartment communities. 

Digging into my ancestry and family history,

I didn’t start out with this intention, but damn if the two things didn’t just come together into one thematic thread: Community, connections and the things that connect us. Possibly because that is the thread which got me to this point in the first place. Let me back up.

Like many in the U.S. (apparently not enough) I was heartsick over the outcome of the November 2024 elections. I still am. In the aftermath of that shock, I commiserated with others about what we do next. How do we get back to some semblance of decency and love for our neighbors and fellow citizens? Several conversations led to this: Focus on the community around you. Your neighbors. Your city. That focus will help us all do a better job of supporting each other, but also draw us into the battles we need to fight at a national level, when we need to fight them. I first heard this from my son, Jim, who does advocacy work for equitable and sustainable transportation in Chicago. Garrett Bucks – who writes the Substack The White Pages – was later a second key voice in making those connections.

So I have, on my mind, what makes local communities work through both local and larger challenges successfully?

At about the same time, my sister shared some work she began on digging into our family history. It’s been a bit of a mystery past our great-grandparents, but we’ve always sensed we have deep roots in the U.S. as well as a rich immigrant history.

Turns out both are true.

Now, I am uncovering stories and am inspired by what I am uncovering. Here are a couple of examples.

My 2nd great grandfather on my father’s side – a German immigrant – came to Kentucky sometime in the late 1830’s presumably to join other family members as a farmer. At the age of 37 in 1861 he volunteered for a Kentucky regiment in the Union Army that was present among some of the most pitched battles of the Civil War. He survived. His son, my great grandfather, led a successful life as a factory worker and lived among the German community in Louisville. He was the father of my grandmother, who lived with my parents when I was growing up.

My mother’s family is Polish on both sides. Her mother’s and father’s ancestors emigrated from Poland to the U.S. at different times but followed similar paths. Find work in coal mines or on the railroads. Move across the U.S. from the east coast. Land in Detroit among a large Polish community in the city. In 1929 my mother’s parents built and owned a home in the city. They moved in as a family – parents and three children. By 1932 it fell apart. My mother’s mother died at age 29, leaving 3 kids with her husband. The family shows up next living together with the extended family in the Polish neighborhood, the kids making their way through grade school and the Depression.

Many other stories like this are coming forward. Many more are emerging; the Merrell’s go back in the U.S. at least to the 1700s.

But what’s coming forward to me, upon reflection, is just how important community and connections were in how those folks made it through some very difficult circumstances. What I know are very surface level facts. What I can easily imagine is how the richness of community connections, not now visible, were so undoubtedly important in these stories. The Germans of Kentucky. The Poles of Detroit.

And importantly: The teachers in the schools, the neighbors, the storekeepers, church members and others who touched their lives from positions outside of immediate family or shared ethnic backgrounds.

This is what gives me hope in 2025. It’s what is meant by the guidance that – if you focus on your community – you support the progress needed to solve local problems but are also linked to the national change-makers who collectively work together to address the issues at larger scale.

This is also what leads me to my journey in 2025 to explore ways my experience might contribute to community, learning and progress at a very local level.

In these posts, I want to share what I actually do rather than what I plan to do. I have plans; accountability is doing the work that emerges from the planning.

Here’s what I’ve done since November of 2024:

• Joined in with a couple of neighbors to start a communications team for our condo/apartment complex. It’s 170 units and a good sized, relatively diverse community of folks. We’re working on an occasional newsletter to spur more community engagement. Issue 1 is in draft.
• Attended a community input session for a new 20-year comprehensive plan for the Evanston (where I live). Among other things, this event started my education on a couple of key issues I’m interested in: Affordable housing, sustainable and equitable transportation, and the city’s diversity. That led me to start digging into topics that are new to me, and finding resources to tap into.
• Attended an advocacy session for folks interested in affordable housing and how it might be impacted by the upcoming comprehensive plan and associated zoning changes. That led me to sign a couple of advocacy letters addressing affordable housing and transportation issues.
• One planned bit: In one week, I plan on attending a meet-the-candidate session for someone running for our neighborhood’s seat on the city council. I’m hoping this provides some new opportunity to connect with other folks and find out who is working on the issues about which I am exploring.

Serendipity is a wonderful thing. Especially if you keep your eyes open to it. In the past 24 hours, I learned that our neighbors were former neighbors of the council candidate (and are sponsoring the meetup). My spouse took a call today from a good friend who knows the city deeply and noted how much respect she has for this candidate. My spidey-sense tells me something interesting will happen as a result of this meetup.

To my final point, and a lesson learned and relearned. Many of us want to do things that have an impact. I am reminding myself that connecting with others, about the things that connect us, is an action. You need to trust that the connecting will lead somewhere you want to go even if you cannot see exactly how that might work out.

And you need to make your connecting activity visible. To that, I want to give a big shout out to Beth Salyers and her Curiosity Tour 2025. I first met Beth in another community of change makers: Asynco, led in part by the amazing Luis Suarez. Beth’s Curiosity Tour gave me the prompt (and the network) to start writing again.

So here we go.

Note: The photographs which accompany these posts are taken by me, and show different settings and views of Evanston (where I live). It is a visual reminder that this is the most important setting for belonging and contributing to community; my neighborhood, my city.