Most of us travel across the same small pieces of earth every day. We walk the same sidewalks. We pass the same trees, vacant lots, fences, storm drains and patches of grass. We drive the same streets and eventually become so familiar with them that we stop seeing them at all.
Together, those ordinary spaces form the physical environment of a community. Their condition affects how a neighborhood looks, how it feels, how people experience it and, eventually, what they believe it is worth.
Stewardship begins when we notice those places again. It begins when we recognize that caring for a community does not have to stop at the edge of the property we personally own.
The Ground We Share
Ownership and stewardship are not the same thing. A resident does not need to own a vacant lot to care whether trash accumulates there. We do not individually own the storm drains along our streets, yet their condition can affect our homes and neighbors.
Much of what makes a community valuable exists between the boundaries of individual ownership. Stewardship can begin with ordinary acts: reporting damage, tending a planted space, preserving an old photograph, helping a neighbor, or paying enough attention to recognize when something has changed.
Pride Follows Participation
We often tell people that they should take pride in their communities. But pride is difficult to command. It may be easier to create the conditions from which pride can grow.
Participation creates familiarity. Familiarity can create attachment. And attachment can become responsibility. Perhaps we should begin by giving one another opportunities to participate.
Five Percent
Community stewardship does not require everyone to become a neighborhood organizer. Sometimes a contribution is twenty minutes. One person notices a problem. Another knows who to contact. One resident knows the history. Another takes photographs.
Five-percent stewardship means that if enough of us contribute a little of what we can, no one person should have to contribute everything. Time, age, ability, resources and circumstances differ. The principle is that everyone can have a place in the work.
A Different Kind of Accounting
As Treasurer of MMHNA, part of my responsibility involves things that are easy to count. Money received can be recorded. Expenses can be documented. Account balances can be reconciled.
The value created through stewardship is harder to place on a ledger. Yet those contributions accumulate too. They become cleaner surroundings, preserved history, healthier landscapes, stronger relationships and visible evidence that someone is paying attention.
The Evidence We Leave
Much of what we know about communities that existed before ours survives because somebody left evidence. A photograph was kept. A document survived. A name was written down. A building remained standing. A newspaper recorded an event.
When we preserve a neighborhood document, record what was planted, or explain why something was done, we leave evidence that people cared for this place.
What Will We Leave Behind?
Every generation inherits a community it did not create entirely for itself. We inherit streets laid by others, trees planted before us, buildings constructed by people we may never know and stories whose beginnings occurred before we arrived.
We can influence what we hand to the people who come next. Notice something. Care for something. Leave something better. If enough people do that, the result becomes larger than any one person’s contribution. It becomes a community.