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The Impact Of Community Engagement With Arianna Bellizzi

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No one knows what’s best for a particular community than the people residing in it. This is why everyone must be involved in community engagement now more than ever. Corinna Bellizzi sits down with her niece Arianna Bellizzi, who has immersed herself into the Anchorage community and recently completed her certification in project management. She discusses how to take part in the efforts of your community councils to address major issues your local area is currently facing. Arianna also explains how redistricting works and the vital role of community engagement in pushing the representative government to do its work.

 

About Guest:

Arianna is a born and raised Californian who fell in love with the long summers, close-knit community, and all that Alaska has to offer someone in search of a home. She recently finished a long successful career at BBC Studios, where she led a highly skilled team for five years, developed relationships with small communities across the state and, most recently, completed her certification in project management. Arianna has immersed herself in the Anchorage community, joining the Arctic Entries story coaching team, providing management experience for local theaters, and connecting with the LGBTQ+ community. Outside of her professional life, Arianna finds joy in urban gardening, travel, and horseback riding.

 

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ariannabellizzi/

Additional Resources Mentioned: https://www.communitycouncils.org

 

Show Notes:

03:19 - Looking Back 

07:18 - Unhoused Neighborhood 

10:08 - Interconnectedness

14:22 - Redistricting 

19:30 - Neighborhood Governance

29:47 - Project Management 

36:31 - Individualism 

46:47 - Giving Up Free Time

49:22 - Episode Wrap-up

 

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The Impact Of Community Engagement With Arianna Bellizzi

In this episode, I'm thrilled to introduce you to my niece, Arianna Bellizzi, as we talk about the need for community engagement and remembering to act locally first so we can create global solutions together. Arianna is a born and raised Californian who fell in love with long summers, a close-knit community, and all that Alaska has to offer someone in search of her home. She finished a long successful career at BBC Studios where she led a highly skilled team for five years and developed relationships with small communities across the state.

She has immersed herself in the Anchorage community, joining the Arctic Entries story coaching team, providing management experience for local theaters, and connecting with the LGBTQ+ community. Outside of her professional life, Arianna finds joy and urban gardening, travel, and horseback riding. That's something else that we share. With that, let me bring her to the stage. Welcome to the show.

Thanks.

How are you doing, Arianna?

I'm good.

Looking Back

Let's talk first about your journey from your education and theater to living up in Alaska. What brought you to this moment and your role as the Executive Director of the Federation of Community Councils in Anchorage?

As you spoke about, I do have a theater degree. I find that my theater degree has taken me a lot farther than the business degree that maybe my parents wanted me to get. I learned a lot. I learned how to put myself in front of people. I learned how to work in a team and think creatively. I worked in entertainment for almost ten years working at local theaters. I worked at a theme park and then I moved to LA and worked for BBC Studios on the Life Below Zero and Life Below Zero Next Generation shows. That brought me to Alaska.

When those shows ended, I was looking for a space that could take my creative thinking, my leadership experience, and my networking and run with it. That's where I found the federation. They had lost their former chief executive, and they were looking for somebody to step into that position and bring a new face and a new change to the organization.

I realize that you got your start in this role officially in March 2024. What have you learned in your first few months that you feel could apply to anyone working in a community organization?

What I found, especially as a young person, I felt disconnected from the national conversations when it comes to what change could look like. I've found that where I can make change happen now is in the civic engagement space locally. It’s getting involved. Most local governments have boards, commissions, or advisory groups where they're seeking citizen input about what's coming up in their community and that's a great place.

You can get on a board and have a voice in what businesses are going to go up in your neighborhood, what your roadways are going to look like, or whether bike lanes are going to be included. In Alaska, what snow removal looks like for our area, how you deal with our unhoused neighbors, and all of that. They want public input and generally, those spaces for public input are occupied by our older neighbors. The people who have been around for a long time, but they're also retired and they don't have kids. They maybe don't have to work anymore.

They have more time and space to be able to think about their community, but those spaces are desperately hungry for young people and people who are working and raising their children in their community. They want to hear from a more diverse space and people. There are lots of spaces to get involved that are low commitment to high commitment where you can make a difference and change what your community looks like.

Unhoused Neighborhood

You mentioned unhoused. People living here in California where I'm at might be a little curious to learn that there's an unhoused community in Alaska where the winters are awful. Gavin Newsom put into effect some interesting changes that involve the dismantling of many of the homeless or unhoused encampments. I wonder how this problem persists in Alaska and perhaps what we should know about it in other states around the United States and other areas.

I'm not an expert on unhoused neighbors in Alaska or the United States, but I can speak to my experience and what I've seen, which is housing is an issue everywhere across the United States. We find that not enough homes are being built, not enough mixed-family homes are being built, and increasingly, urban sprawl has to expand out because there's this priority on single-family homes. Also, you go to a city and you find empty lots or abandoned properties that haven't been taken up and haven't been built and that can be for a variety of reasons.

When you don't have enough housing, which you're seeing is people who are working full-time jobs, maybe two jobs are unable to get a house. That is because there are not enough units. There's not enough stock so rents go up and then they can't afford to move in somewhere or maybe they missed a payment and got evicted, and that is now on their record.

Oftentimes, there are very few landlords in these spaces as well. You'll see 1 or 2. Even if you don't get evicted, but you're missing payments, that is on their record. They may not want to rent to you when you do get yourself into a space where you can rent. You see people living in RVs and their cars because they have no other options. There's not enough housing available. That's as true here in Anchorage as it is in a lot of places across the United States.

Interconnectedness

It becomes so much more problematic when you talk about the extreme weather. The experience in that area is cold long winters where it's dark a lot of the day. I realize you're not up in Point Barrow. Anchorage is a little bit more temperate than that but still, this is not Venice Beach in California for certain. You'd need different resources for your homeless population, and the unsheltered people for the winter months as well. As you become more integrated in this particular line of work, moving from the for-profit sector working with BBC to nonprofit, what major differences are you seeing so far?

There is a lot of work to be done in a lot of different spaces. The major thing that I see from moving from for-profit to non-profit is that interconnectedness. When people come to community councils, they may come for a singular issue. It’s to talk about their unhoused neighbors, to talk about a park, or a public safety issue but there's a cross between a public safety issue and funding. Also, public safety issues are land use, zoning, and code enforcement.

What we're seeing in Anchorage is that for every person looking for a job, there are two jobs available. We have a crazy workforce shortage up here. That means that our municipality is severely understaffed and that affects everybody every day. Every day, there's not enough support being given, and the burden is going on the municipal employees who are there to work harder and harder. What I've seen moving into this space is that there is so much interconnectedness and you can't look at one issue and solve that one issue like you maybe could when you're trying to market a for-profit concept or item. There's less cross between all of all of the issues.

I would imagine too if you're talking about a community where there are more jobs than there are people that you would have a harder time getting volunteers to work an event because there's so much paid work to go around and people have the time. There are jobs open for them to jump into them. Does that impact you from a staffing perspective or put extra stress on you to run this not-for-profit?

We don't run on volunteers directly for the federation. The community councils though are fully volunteer-run. As the support organization, it's our job to reach and help them grow the number of volunteers showing up to their meetings and also mentor their next board members. You do see people who are incredibly busy and who go, “I don't have time to be on another board,” or “I don't have time to care about another thing.”

I also see people who are thinking about getting their next meal on their table so they're not in a space to even think about civic engagement. It takes quite a bit of mental availability to be able to think broader than what's happening in your own life. You have to be in a space to support yourself enough to be able to think about others. According to the most recent census data, I believe it was 2021, Alaska is second in the nation likely to talk to friends and family.

Care More Be Better | Arianna Bellizzi | Community Engagement

 

You do see a very strong interconnectedness in the state. People rely on each other but it is harder to then take that outside of inner circles and into, “Can we think about the community as a whole? Can we impart that across the whole community?” You'll see people who have their hands in a bunch of different spaces because they're the kind of person who thinks who can and wants to think in that way, but it's hard to break into the world where people maybe aren't thinking about their broader community.

Redistricting

This leads me to a question I had that I was hoping we could unpack a bit together because you were on a recent podcast where they were somewhat critical of the number of councils and said, “Maybe we need fewer councils and fewer people involved in essentially this community organization overall.” I wanted for you to have the opportunity to talk about these oppositional perspectives and how you might speak on behalf of these councils that may in some cases be struggling to get enough engagement from their communities. How should we be thinking about this?

On that podcast, his thought was not to lessen engagement, but to lessen the number of councils to increase engagement.

To merge them or connect them in some way so that there are fewer group voices, so to speak.

In the United States, we often talk about redistricting. These random groups of people come together and set what a voting district looks like and that is highly contested. It's uncommon in Alaska, but you see these crazy districts that are the weirdest shapes and they don't make sense. What you don't see generally in neighborhood governance when you look at, we call them community councils, but across the US they could be called neighborhood associations or neighborhood councils.

The reason that they're set in more standard squares is because the idea of them comes from the neighborhood deciding what their boundary looks like. You see more, “This major cross street and this major cross street and the ocean and this park are our boundary, and therefore that makes us into this nice little square.”

Almost like a school district too because often school districts are more like that. They're more like a community that's affected by traffic and boundaries that make sense.

That's the wonderful thing about neighborhood governance is that instead of 5 or 6 people coming in and saying, “This is what the standard should be,” you get to build it from the ground up and say, “These are my neighbors. This is my community.” When we're talking about whether they should be bigger or smaller, to me that is not the conversation we should be having.

The conversation we should be having is, “Does this community feel unified or is there enough split?” When you start to hear people say, for example, we have a community council called Sand Lake. If people internally start to refer to themselves as North-South Lake and South-South Lake or East and West, that's when all of a sudden this community is too big and it needs to divide.

Also, if you have a community where maybe the population has changed quite a bit and you've seen people leave for whatever reason. Maybe they built a big park and it took up a swath of land. Maybe they put in nude roadways or something where it would make more sense that because of the changing demographics and the change of the roadways over time, that land doesn't cut as neatly and that community isn't as organized as it was before.

Maybe it would make sense to bring them into the fold because they're only a couple of thousand and next to them is a couple of thousand and those people should be more unified. A great example is Fairview has its boundaries go right across a major artery so they are continually working on this effort called Reconnecting Fairview. That doesn't mean that Fairview shouldn't identify as one group. There shouldn't necessarily be East and West Fairview.

They are one neighborhood, and they want to be that way. We wouldn't split them up because a roadway goes between them, but we would think about what are those neighbors asking for. In any community, it should come from that neighborhood governance. It should be driven from a groundswell. We could come in and make sweeping changes to the neighborhoods of Anchorage or any community, but what that would be is representative government coming in and telling neighborhood government governance what it should do.

Those are both important forms of governance, but they are separate and it's important that they're separate because they serve different distinct roles in how we operate. We are not a truly true democracy. We are not one person, one vote on every single thing, but on some things we are and that's where neighborhood governance comes in.

 

We are not a true democracy. We do not give one vote per person on every single thing. But everything changes in neighborhood governance.

 

Neighborhood Governance

Could you give an example of something that the neighborhood governance would cover as opposed to something being handled by your representatives in legislation?

Neighborhood governance often in a grand scheme looks at what's called neighborhood plans. What does this community want our area to look like over the next twenty years? In Anchorage, they do maybe 20 or 40-year plans, and they're trying to gauge, “How are we setting our rules now for what we want our community to look like in the future?” They'll reset that plan in a couple of decades.

Groups come together to create these neighborhood plans and say that they want bike lanes or we want better parks or whatever. We want to fix this weird roadway that divides our community. Setting those plans is something that is the work of community councils. It is the work of neighborhood councils because they are having conversations day to day about how their neighborhood is or isn't working for them.

You can't have a representative who may be overseas 4 or 5 councils or 4 or 5 neighborhoods. You can't have them come in and say, “I think your neighborhood should look like this,” because that person may not even live in that neighborhood, may not know those neighbors, and may not be aware of some of the conversations. Their kids may not be affected by a busing shortage in the same way that these neighbors are.

That's where you're seeing the commentary because it is so small, which is, “Why are we so focused on it being so small,” but that's because only the people in your close area are going to be affected in the same way you are by when your street, for example, is on well water and the neighboring street is on city water and they're redoing your street. Nobody has thought to ask, “As you're redoing the street, can we get hooked into city water?”

That is only something your street is going to know about. Even government officials may not be thinking about it. That's where community councils and neighborhood associations filter in that like, “We have a very specific issue. How do we get it fixed?” That's where neighborhood governance comes in. That's how they then come together and support each other in moving in advising city representatives on how to fix things in the city.

Care More Be Better | Arianna Bellizzi | Community Engagement

 

The reason I was looking for an example is that I think each of us, if we want to understand what it takes to get involved with our local communities and the types of things that we can affect and change, it's helpful to think that way. I'll give another example from my neighborhood. We know that there were certain things that went up for community vote.

For instance, when there was a Christian college that had essentially gotten to the point where it was pretty decrepit and defunct and was going bankrupt. They employed people in my local neighborhood, including the little old lady who lived across the street from me. Her husband was a World War II vet. He had been a ball turret gunner and had gone down over enemy territory in Germany.

We got to know them pretty well. She taught there. My other neighbor was their coach and everybody called him coach. This college was going belly up. A company came in 1440 Multiversity. They had put their plans out for everybody to see and frankly, I think everyone was like, “Yes, please,” because that college owned a lot of the homes in the neighborhood and they had started to fall down because they were that old and that poorly maintained.

It turned out that many of them had asbestos in them that had to be cleared out. Some were tear-downs and others had to be updated to code for the present time. Now, the entire space is beautiful. It looks like a ski lodge neighborhood nestled into the redwoods. That affects everybody's property values. It also affects traffic because they have big events and those big events bring in a lot of vehicles that impact the roadways.

We have also experienced floods and fires in this area. Community members are getting more and more involved and engaged out of the necessity that they see in their local environments. I know that there are other things that go up for a vote, for instance, when there are big building permits coming in. One of the big questions has been water use.

You mentioned well water versus city water. Water is a finite resource, and so the number of building permits that get approved has to be affected by water use. We approved a lot of building permits over the last five years, and now, we don't have enough water to properly irrigate the fields at our local parks.

There's this tension vying from within the space to say, “We don't want all of our park grass to completely dry up, disappear, and be gopher mounds. We need to assess and deliver water where it's needed. How can we make other changes that are going to facilitate the proper use of water? Does this affect future building permits for that reason?”

Also, it affects things like what's nominated as business property versus personal property. Also, how the zoning affects mixed use versus singular use. It seems to me that more of the approved projects of late here in my area are mixed-use. It might be retail shops down below, apartments up top, or perhaps buildings that are more business-oriented with storefronts in front and then set back behind them residential with even shared parking lots in some cases. It's interesting to see how communities are addressing these things in their own way as needs are up. I want to get more involved so I am on all their email lists now, and that's step one.

That version of community voting is something that exists in your community but is not consistent across the US. Anchorage doesn't have that level of community voting for those kinds of issues. There are certain things, mostly funding that go to the general vote but we don't have localized voting. Most of it in Anchorage looks like resolutions or generally, what these neighborhood associations are doing is networking. They are leveraging soft power to be able to push for what's in their best interest, and it's by their board members and their organizational members who know people and who can help get the right ideas in the right heads to get positive change in their community.

To your point, I don't know if I had the opportunity to vote. It was more like they posted the plans and the communities had these open comment sessions. Also, meeting opportunities where we could specifically connect with the developers and voice our concerns about their plans overall. The one real complaint I had is that I wanted them to keep the trail access open so that we could still use their trails, and now they've gone fully private.

Land use tends to be the number one thing that community councils or neighborhood associations handle. That could be a number of things. Here, it's liquor licenses because we have a limited number of liquor licenses and they're very regulated as well as marijuana licenses in town. It also means building developers are required to have a community meeting here in Anchorage before they do work.

That often happens through the community councils. It doesn't have to, but it does a lot of the time. Also, rezoning and then plans that the representative government may have for Anchorage will come often before community councils as a chance to hear thoughts and have some conversations that you may not be able to have when you look at representative government.

We have an assembly and the general citizen gets three minutes to present in front of the assembly. That's not a conversation that's a three-minute monologue in which they sometimes ask questions, but generally, they're getting through so much public hearing that they are listening and moving on versus in a council setting, you can have a question and answer.

Care More Be Better | Arianna Bellizzi | Community Engagement

 

It's also important to note that community councils and neighborhood associations when fully functioning are not the end of the conversation. They should be working in partnership with other organizations, other nonprofits, and other interest groups. They are focused on a geographical focus, but you'll also have issue-based and identity-based groups who should be working in an ideal world all together to push for the betterment of their area.

Project Management

I'm impressed with everything you've learned in such a short time. I know you've been up in Anchorage for some time, so you've been involved in these communities. I also understand that you recently achieved a certificate in project management. Did you want to talk about that for a moment and then perhaps how that might be used for something like community engagement or even activism?

I got my certificate because the language that I was using on television was unique to television. Something that certification gave me was a more general language that crosses multiple industries. While I already had the experience, the certification helped me reaffirm that the things I already was doing were in the path of what is expected out of a project manager. It does help when it comes to talking with subject matter experts.

The community councils deal with a lot of different things and that means that I have to be aware of and in communication with all sorts of subject matter experts across Anchorage. Being able to read code or understand what a scope is or know who the stakeholders are in a situation is important to knowing how everything functions. It wasn't something I or maybe people outside of managing projects knew. I try to think about what is the lowest common denominator.

What is the person with the least amount of experience going to go through? Some of these areas are difficult to navigate so it's nice when council board members have a lot of experience to bring to the table and can break it down for somebody who is trying to understand how they can get a speed bump in their neighborhood. How do I make that happen? Also, planning and zoning is quite confusing. Who do I talk to and what do I ask for?

One of the most complicated flow charts I think you could create would be how the city manages all of its resources and who's doing what. It almost takes that internal perspective. I think somebody who's gone to business school like myself, granted, I didn't do that until I'd already been working for over twenty years. In my own way, I'm working to fill the gaps and see where I might be missing knowledge. I already had all of that base. Some of the courses were quite simple and easy for me. Aside from accounting and calculus, that stuff has always been hard for me but I was able to complete it.

Also, I can speak or at least understand the vernacular that comes out of a CEO or CFO's mouth and feel equally weighted and positioned to be able to go toe-to-toe if I need to or when I need to. I always think education is helpful and supportive. Everyone I've spoken to who has gone through some certification specifically in project management has said that it prepared them to better manage multiple different styles of projects in and outside of their business life, as well as in their personal side of life. It seems to be one of the most utilitarian types of certifications that are out there for work in business. Would you agree with that?

Yeah. The format is nice and the education is nice. What it misses quite a bit is collaboration. I found that the area of people management was underrepresented significantly in the course.

It's more like a task or completion.

Considering that, the whole purpose of a project manager is to get the work out of the way for the people to do the work. That's what I talk about with community councils. My job as a full-time staff member is to get as much work off of the plates of the volunteers so that they can do the work of volunteering and I can do all the busy work for them. That's not their responsibility unless they want it, but they don't have to do it because they have so much other work to do and I'm asking for valuable free time.

That means that you have to manage people. My personal soapbox as a manager who prides herself on being a good manager and caring about my employees and thinking about their betterment is that there are a lot of people who are very good at their job, who are managers and are not good managers. Just because you excel in a subject does not mean you should be in charge of managing people because you see businesses suffer under poor management.

 

Someone who excels at their job does not necessarily have to be in charge of managing people.

 

Staff members who are talented want to do a good job, and maybe their boss is good, but their boss is unable to communicate, train, or take accountability. That lower employee does not want to step up because they're punished or micromanaged when they could be flourishing under a little bit more guidance and maybe a little less naysaying.

Oversight or looking over your shoulder.

The project management section of people management is I believe it's only 20% or 30% of the overall score. I get that Gantt charts are important, but are they more important than how somebody feels and whether they're going to be able to get that work done because their child is home sick? It's hard to teach those skills, and the focus is too much on firm knowledge and less on soft skills. The soft skills are where generally I see people struggle. I can read the definition of a Gantt chart or look that up, but I can't teach somebody how to care.

 

Anyone can read the definition of a Gantt chart. However, you cannot teach somebody how to care.

 

Individualism

You're speaking to a bigger problem in the world of business overall and in fact, it's the world. This is part of the problem I think of living in a society that is focused on individualism because then the responsibility is on you to do the task and be task-oriented versus learning the softer skills. It's not easy to teach.

In business school, they try to tackle that from the perspective of saying, “A lot of your projects are group projects, so you have to find a way to collaborate and to work together to finish a task.” Sometimes that means that you're assigning different parts of the project to people with varying skills but then that project management piece comes in and it's like, “I'm somebody who doesn't like to procrastinate to the very last minute, but there are two team members who are doing their work at the very last minute. None of us gets the opportunity to review it and make sure that it's cohesive as part of the whole until the eleventh hour when we're stitching everything together.”

That creates its own problem, especially when you're thinking about a course term of ten weeks. From the start to the end of any project you're working on, it's going to be less than ten weeks which isn't real life for the most part. A lot of the complex projects that we might undertake could be months long or even years long.

What I'm encouraged to see though right now and in this particular political climate that we're in is that there's a lot of effort happening on the political side of the aisle where people from a community engagement perspective are working to bridge gaps and collaborate and even work across the aisle to get things done.

I'm hopeful that part of our culture can shift a little bit. I also think that part of the problem is that you have people who rise because they're good at their job, but then they never get coached to work with people. We learn by doing. Sometimes you make big mistakes, and if you don't spend time in self-reflection, if you don't have somebody to be a sounding board that you can truly trust and open up with without fear of retribution yourself, then it's hard to grow.

I always tell people that I'm training that, “You can jump and I am your safety net,” and you need that. You need somebody who at least can be a safety net for a bit. There's this concept, and I forget what the name of it is, but because we're as democracy-focused as a country, we think that it's the greatest majority. Fifty-one percent and we're good to go or a quorum of people, whatever you decide quorum is.

As long as those people agree to it, then it's worth it. There's another concept where everybody has to agree and that means that everybody is going to compromise, but everybody is going to agree. If we focus more on finding a solution that does fit everyone, it's not going to work for all concepts. However, I think when it comes we want to think about what our communities are going to look like, and if we can find work that works for everyone, even if everyone also has to give up something.

That's a compromise.

Right, but then there's greater buy-in on that process because everybody then has a vested interest in it because they all said yes to it, and they also gave up something to see it happen but it's slower. There's this idea that government has to be quick and responsive and has to move stuff quickly. I don't necessarily think the government always has to move incredibly fast to get work done and that taking the time to get buy-in from everybody, instead of saying, “Most of us agree to this, so this is fine,” would mean that our community was more invested in that work as a whole.

Care More Be Better | Arianna Bellizzi | Community Engagement

 

One of the other problems that can enter our world here is when so many people are working on a project and somewhere along the way, it becomes evident to at least to even half of the people that this isn't a good idea. We shouldn't do this thing, but everybody has put in so much work already, and the plans are already in place that it gets done anyway.

Even if you discover halfway through the project that this is not good for anybody. Nobody is happy. If we could stop and roll back, then everything would be fine. One of the things I work to build into my work life and what I do is say, “Here's the project,” but we have these guardrails and we have these moments in time where we're going to look at the project and say, “Does it go forward or does it get killed?”

Also, to make that part of how you conduct yourself to say, “Nobody gets to have a complete sacred cow. This isn't going to happen no matter what. We have these moments in time when we assess the project and say, “Does this make sense to go forward or not?” The key way that I'm integrating this is in product development. You're going to create a new product. You've done the market assessment. Things look good, but then you have some unforeseen circumstances that come in while you're working on the project.

They could be competitive. They could be cost constrictions. It could be that some element of what you're working on suddenly became a lot more expensive and may have priced itself out of the market. You have certain sunk costs that you've accrued along the way because you've done the research, you've done the work, but you'd still lose more if you went forward.

There's one for instance that came up in San Francisco, and I heard about it through the grapevine, but it was like this entire community living in a fairly wealthy community within San Francisco wanted to go ahead and produce this park. The budget was allowing them to go ahead and do this but then one team wanted this restroom/community center that was built on it to be this high-end space, and there wasn't quite enough money to build it the way they wanted.

Because of this friction, nothing got done. Instead of reassessing and perhaps scaling it back a little bit, it got stuck in the process so then nobody is happy and it's not happening. It could happen differently if we'd be willing to go back to the drawing board on this one thing and work through that again. However, the project length and how budgets are allocated all affect whether or not it can get done because the money's set aside, but only in a certain way. It’s complicated stuff that is above my area of expertise in this arena but it keeps me interested anyway.

Generally, communities are too small for us to be as angry as we are against each other. Anchorage only has a little over 200,000 people in it. I run into people I may not like, don't get along with, or don't agree with politically at the grocery store every day. Our city and most communities, when you get to the boiled-down community are too small for us to be as angry.

Everybody needs to do a little internal work and come to the table and recognize that we're all going to compromise on something. Also, it's important to know what you can and can't compromise and maybe an aesthetic is something that we're willing to compromise on because we get the structure of what we're looking for. We're looking for a bathroom community center, and that is important and the aesthetic that's pushing us over budget or doesn't work in this scenario, we're going to let go of.

That's true coming to the table and being willing to collaborate. That's why I'm very glad that I have a creative background because something in art that you're taught is to “kill” your babies, which sounds like the worst cut from this podcast if you cut that from me but essentially the idea is you are going to create beautiful work and not all of it is going to be in line with the greater team.

If you have a director or a head writer, that might not be within their vision of what they expected. You have to say this funny joke or set piece or lighting design or whatever it is that you bring to the table is not going to work. You may love it and desperately think it's the best thing you've ever created, but it's not what's going to work.

That’s a group thing. When I said the sacred cow, you can't have one. You can't have a sacred cow like your thing that is, “This is the only way it can exist.” What do they say? “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go as a group.” That's the saying. I'm forgetting who originally said it, but if you want your sacred cow, you can go work on that on your solo project, and it may or may not come to fruition the way you wanted it anyway.

Giving Up Free Time

It’s because sometimes what you can work together on and compromise on as a group ends up coming out much better than you would've even thought possible. Keeping that lens and understanding that generally speaking as a group people can produce better work than any one person on their own. Is there any thought that you'd like to leave our audience with or perhaps some takeaway that you'd like them to think about with regard to their communities and their work?

There's this idea that to participate means that you have to give the rest of your free time to participate in local government. If there is something of interest to you, your kids are in school. Most community meetings are recorded in some way. Listen to them. Go and maybe ask a question. That is enough. It doesn't have to be something where you're serving on the board. You can attend and you can also say, “I can only go for two hours and I have to leave early if the meeting runs long”

All of those are acceptable ways to come to the table. If you find yourself struggling to get into your community and get involved, make it easy on yourself. Set a limited timeframe. Show up to one meeting. Sign up for an email list that maybe can give you agendas and read those until you see something that maybe makes you want to show up to the table, but don't feel like it has to be a big lift to get there. Your local government probably wants you there, and they're going to try and make it easy for you.

Those are words of wisdom from your mouth to God's ear. Hopefully, people will listen and get involved with their local communities. I have followed that same advice. I'm on the email lists and there are a few things that I've chosen to champion. I've talked about them a couple of times on this show. One of them was pushing for composting in our county, and another was related to how we use our open spaces.

I went to the land trust meetings where they were talking about the allocation of park resources because those things are important to me. Do I want to be involved in every community discussion? No. Do I have the time for it? No, but I'm showing up when it matters to me, when it's something I'm passionate about and that I feel I can contribute to, which is part and parcel of that conversation too.

Episode Wrap-up

I encourage people to follow their passions. What are they passionate about in their community? If you're going down the street and something's constantly bugging you. There's that pothole that never gets addressed. Maybe show up because you don't know. Maybe nobody else has thought about it to the point of bringing it up at a council meeting to get something addressed and assessed. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been amazing.

Thanks for having me. This has been fun.

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