It’s a tough time to talk about unity, but that word has been on my heart since the beginning of this year. We all know “a house divided cannot stand,” but how can we begin to put the pieces back together again?
Finding Community in Shared Purpose
As I thought and prayed about it, I was moved by a sermon about building community around a shared sense of purpose, rather than a shared identity. The message was based on Acts, which tells a clear and powerful story about the socioeconomic, ethnic, and ideological diversity of the early church and how they worked together – often despite their differences. To me, it was an inspired roadmap.
Finding a sense of shared purpose in our times and in our field, however, is not easy. Loss and grief, offense and retaliation, isolation, and sheer exhaustion make it hard to muster the energy it takes to understand, forgive, and unite around getting good stuff done together. I understand from my own experience. Since February, Groundswell has received termination letters for $176 million in federal contracts that would build resilience, fix houses, and cut power bills in half for more than 17,000 families. We are still standing firm, moving forward, and serving people with joy – but some days are better than others.
Freedom, Together
Our culture doesn’t make it any easier. I am sure we have all seen, and many of us may actually have, a bright yellow license plate that reads “don’t tread on me” referencing the Gasden Flag from the Revolutionary War. What we sometimes forget defending liberty, however, is that the rattlesnake was originally a symbol of American unity.
In 1754, about 20 years before Christopher Gasden flew that famous yellow flag, Benjamin Franklin shared a different version. Published in the Pennsylvania Gazette, it asserted the imperative for the American colonies to “Join, or Die.”
A Call to Unity
As a person of faith, I am also mindful of a third snake, and it symbolizes healing. Cast in bronze and placed on a pole by Moses, it healed the Israelites in the desert.
Groundswell has re-imagined these powerful historic images of liberty, unity, and healing as a contemporary call to unite that incorporates a bundle of arrows honoring the oldest participatory democracy on earth – the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, creators of the Great Law of Peace. This invitation is one way we are transforming the attempts to terminate $176 million in funding for the rural Southeast into an invitation to stand together.
“Warmly Welcoming One Another”
Unite, but where and to what end? On November 10-12, we are coming together in Opelika, Alabama at the Rural Renaissance Roadshow to find shared purpose building rural resilience. Resilience can mean a lot of things, including having enough gristle and bone to survive whatever the world throws at you. But what we’re talking about is resilience by design – that is what we want to do, not what gets done to us – so that we can thrive. And we’re focusing on energy, water, food, and housing.
Our friend Kate at As the Crow Flies Design developed a mural of last year’s Roadshow in Macon. While some things, like the availability of federal investments, have changed, one very important thing has not. At the very center of the picture, we are warmly welcoming one another – and that means everyone. In that spirit, I hope you can join us at this year’s Roadshow. Registration is $125 and includes the meals we’ll share, and if $125 is tough this year, please let us know, and we will work with you – because not only is everyone welcome, everyone matters.
See you in Opelika,
L. Michelle Moore
CEO, Groundswell