Community
Examples of building a community . . .
A sense of community, of belonging, is comforting and stress reducing. While most of us think in terms of local communities, such as small towns or gated communities or the local neighborhoods, some of us think in larger terms — the world as our community.
Unless you have grown up in an area, it takes effort to belong. A great tool for this is a free service called NextDoor (https://nextdoor.com/). It allows for the creation of a geographically defined area as your community into which you can invite neighbors to join. Think of a tightly confined Facebook group with no chance of foolish postings to bother with.
My wife Mary Ann and I had an interesting experience about 8 years ago flying back from Singapore where Mary Ann was conducting classes in global sales processes. As we were sitting on a plane at LAX getting ready to fly back to Florida, Mary Ann was reading about the flight attendant of the month, Penny Rambacher, and suddenly realized that the flight attendant helping us was Penny. We asked and she shyly said “yes” I am the Employee of the Month for American Airlines.
We began talking with her and she said she lived in Naples, Florida! We do too! She told us of her charity, Miracles In Action (http://miraclesinaction.org/) providing assistance in the form of schools and skills training in Guatemala. Upon arriving home, we immediately became supporters of Penny’s work. We are pleased to have built a school in Guatemala that we dedicated to honor our parents. In 2015 we are building our second school in honor of our brothers and sisters! It is our plan to build a third school in honor of our children in grandchildren in 2016.
Some years ago I was doing pro bono coaching with a client who was dying from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). Her husband and daughter, in gratitude, sent me a check after she died. I didn’t know what to do with the check since I wanted to work pro bono. I just pinned it to my desk bulletin board and waited to figure it out. One day, going through the mail and discarding what looked like junk mail, as the envelope hit the waste basket I noticed the face of a child on the outside. I retrieved the fund raising letter that had come from SmileTrain (http://www.smiletrain.org/).
Reading the letter I knew what the money could be used for. In honor of Diane Sheehan and her family, four children were given a chance at a life by having surgery that changed everything for them.
Mary Ann and I consider our neighborhood as our community but also Guatemala and parts of the rest of the world too.
