Summer is in full swing and I’m relishing the long, fragrant days after surviving (and at times enjoying) another winter. Each day I look for new ways to connect with, and commit to, the natural and human landscapes that are my world, my place. This summer’s Scenarios issue explores a number of different ways people experience, influence, and truly commit to the places we call home. 

In her essay, author Janisse Ray finds home in rural Georgia through childhood stories, experiences, memories and the local landscape. In a sort of rallying cry for the diversity of place itself, she exhorts us to dig deep to find what’s special in our communities and then commit to it. Our review of Francis Moore Lappé’s important and ultimately optimistic book, Getting a Grip, explores the need for re-framing discussions about our futures and where we live, a “power creating” endeavor. While Ray finds community in the family ties, local customs and landscapes of home, Lappé reminds us that community can also be built through the Internet and new technologies, as our feature on the use of social networking for planning also suggests.

The Orton Family Foundation embraces both of these perspectives. One of the bedrock principles behind our Community Heart & Soul Planning approach is deep, inclusive, effective participation by the full diversity of people in communities. This includes listening to and acting on many points of view, which in turn necessitates a variety of engagement methods, from face-to-face conversations in neighborhoods to the high tech social networks that today’s youth use to spin webs of community across places and time.

One of the most underrepresented groups in land use planning is youth, but we’ve found that this group is especially adept at bridging the high-tech, digital approach and the high-touch, place-based approach to community engagement. The descriptor “youth” is certainly a relative term (at age 52 I still proclaim my youth), but most communities struggle to engage children, teenagers, twenty-somethings and even young families in planning and local government. We’re excited to provide inspiring examples of ways that communities can engage younger generations, including our own Manchester (VT) Youth Commission project, through which high school students are truly getting involved and experiencing the joy (and responsibility) of influencing their community’s decisions by serving as voting members on Town boards. Whether participating in an evening planning commission discussion or a “Valley Quest” (see this issue’s “Innovator in Place” interview), students are learning about the people and places in their communities, and those communities invariably come to value their participation and good thinking. Through the programs we profile, youth have found one of Frances Moore Lappe’s powerful “entry points” to Living Democracy and the excitement is palpable, hopeful.

I think it is natural and important for our youth to leave their sheltered places of upbringing and experience other cultures, histories and thinking; however, it is the Foundation’s expectation that early involvement in their communities will eventually either entice these future leaders back home or motivate them to live the culture wherever they settle. After making a difference where they grow up, we believe these same students will make their adult homes vibrant and enduring and will, in Janisse Ray’s words, commit to their places.

We hope you enjoy this issue of Scenarios and, as always, invite you to send us comments or other examples of adults or youth individually or collectively making a difference in their communities’ futures.

Sincerely,

William Roper
President & CEO