Role Models for Creative Action

Creative community builders ask, what good thing won't happen unless I do it?

Voluntary Action

Small Ponds aims to inspire readers to devote some of their gifts to community building by taking ownership through action. In Not So Far from Home: Owning Homelessness in My Own Backyard, I explain that ownership in this context means
accepting a level of responsibility and care for my community and the earth that extends past my footprint and my personal portfolio. This brand of ownership is local activism that does things with and for people, not to them.

Throughout the book I use the term “volunteer” to describe unpaid people taking actions essential to sustaining community life and creating social change. In practice, there’s a range of voluntary roles, and I can identify four role types that I’ve performed over the years. People are not exclusively one type, sometimes overlapping or in parallel.

Volunteers tend to be rule-followers and role-fillers in community service organizations. Volunteer role-identity shows a “system-fitting pattern.” They often have great enthusiasm for the group’s mission, but some may be more interested in volunteering for personal reasons—building skills, and they perform specialized tasks or simply provide supplemental labor. may volunteer in a more generalized

Advocates are more typically issue- or mission-driven. They may have a personal or familial stake in the work and are more likely to seek a specific change or correction made by more powerful institutions. Curing disease, injustice, human rights abuses, etc. Rather than tearing down these institutions, they seek to improve them or push their work in a particular direction.

Mutual aid is more flexible than focused. It organizes according to group solidarity and faithfulness to shared principles principles ..operates with minimal structure, direct exchange between people, and a collective spirit. Socialist, libertarian, anarchist, utopian, community organizers, certain faiths, and very grassroots. Solidarity and faithfulness to certain principles at the center.

Creative disrupters are apt to be more individualistic and in search of new approaches. They value like-minded cohorts but don’t necessarily want to join a group. lso don’t care for standard formulas ask, what needs doing that will only happen if I do it?). Activist role-identity as “system-challenger” and “true-to-the-self.”

Do you relish flying amid uncertainty or would you prefer a script, guardrails, and modest expectations of what you need to deliver? A worker bee role …A system challenger will chafe in a system-fitting role, unless the organization values as certain level of creative disruption.

As a writer, I’ve always favored the high autonomy/disruptor end of the spectrum and been inspired by neighborhood and civil rights activists, spiritual guides, community elders, and creatives of all stripes. I am compiling personal honor roll of friends, neighbors, and fellow creators ….. They are worthy role models for how one can reshape their community to be more just, beautiful, and resilient.

Rose McGee. Rose’s Sweet Potato Comfort Pie non-profit practices “baketivism”—using food culture and other creative forms of connection-building to advance racial justice and equity, heal damage caused by race-based trauma, and elevate marginalized voices and experiences. She grows and shares the pie through story-circles, healing retreats, and workshops; original community-based artistic productions; youth/elder arts mentorships, and events honoring community builders.

Catherine Reid Day. Catherine is a prolific, place-focused connector and community collaborator who practices cultural psychology, a story-based approach for individuals and organizations making transitions. She was instrumental in preserving an affordable St. Paul neighborhood facing displacement by development as well in establishing a Creative Enterprise Zone that transformed a large industrial district into a vibrant and equitable urban neighborhood.

Michelle Christenson. One Good Deed originated with neighborhood moms who dedicated one night a month to maintaining their friendship by doing crafts. After a group project building little free libraries, they began scheduling monthly creative events to spread kindness, generate friendships, and grow community. This recipe has produced winter scarf-bombings, crocheting sleeping mats for the homeless, a charity garage sale, a trail of playgrounds, and a community garden toolshed.

Danny Rosen. Lithic Bookstore & Gallery reflects Danny Rosen’s hyphenated history as a world rock- climber-field-geologist, teacher-astronomer, and poet-patron. The Lithic space is also a poetry press, performance venue, and employer of creative activists. Danny’s more host than promoter, more catalyst than agitator. He is radically open to contrasting perspectives and the endless possibilities of life, making Lithic a restorative home place for people of all stripes.

Jacob Richards. Jacob has been called “antifa lunatic” by Grand Junction’s power structure. I see him as relentless in supporting people without power in their fights for justice. He’s been an organizer of local resistance to predatory finance, homelessness, Aspenification, COVID-19 chaos, racism, and white-washing local history. As a writer and alternative press publisher, he exposes wrongdoing and espouses principles of mutual aid, solidarity, and direct action as creative forces.

Stephania Vasconez. A sudden surplus of donated food overwhelmed the soup kitchen where Stephania volunteered. Seeking an alternative to wasting it led her to the Richards-initiated Grand Junction Mutual Aid, which had newly arisen in response to disruptions caused by the pandemic. While coordinating the group’s weekly food distribution, she saw how other support gaps affected the community, and she formed Mutual Aid Partners to link other grassroots group serving the poor.

Wendy Fernstrum. Wendy’s a certified spiritual director, artist, and spiritual listener for people on the margins. She volunteers at Peace House where she currently leads a ‘zinemaking workshop, as well as with Walking with a Purpose, which brings clothing and supplies to people in encampments throughout St. Paul. She creates an artist’s book project each year related to homelessness. In 2024 it was Homeland, a virtual cemetery that lists individuals who died while homeless in Minnesota.

Wally Barrett. For over 45 years, Wally’s Food Rescue and Deliveries has brought much needed items to homeless encampments, food banks, Native Elders and reservations, women’s shelters and children’s homes, senior centers, people living with disabilities, families, crime victims, and pets all over the metro Denver area. With volunteers and his aging pickup, he helps move people’s belongings when they are being evicted or moving from homelessness to their own home.

Kathleen Zuckerman. Kathleen has mastered the arts of listening and learning, which she practices as the resident Peace House art lady and in-demand hand masseuse. She also serves on the advisory council that ensures the board hears community voices. She’s been a family caseworker, teacher in New York City and Chicago, and volunteered at a home for unwed mothers and a shelter for victims of domestic abuse. She’s guided by the question, “Where will I have the greatest impact on others— and on myself?”

Ellie Kingsbury. Ellie’s work blends photography, three-dimensional art, and community engagement. Her conceptual projects are rooted in the beauty and life force found in ordinary people and places. ordinary. Her Reading Between the Lines exhibit brought together audio interviews with street dwellers, artful photographs of them flying cardboard signs with provocative messages, and a maze of rough shelter-like cardboard structures emblazoned with quotations from the interviews.

Jeff Scherer. Jeff is an artist and retired architect living in Portland. He’s a Peace House donor, not a volunteer there, but I include because he inspired my approach to publishing Not So Far from Home. He uses his artwork to help libraries and other not-for-profit organizations do more in their communities by giving his work for free in exchange for a charitable donation of any amount to a library or charity of the donor’s choice. As of this writing, he’s instigated 303 donations to charities.

Walter Gallacher. After teaching adults on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Wally returned to his hometown to instruct, market, and lead at the local college. Over 20 post-retirement years, he has produced Immigrant Stories, a beautiful radio program, podcast, and oral history project that illuminates immigrant stories of leaving home, family, and culture to survive, persist, and triumph in the strange and welcoming land of Western Colorado.

Mike Hazard Media Mike is a filmmaker and photographer, poet, community activist, and artist in schools. He’s a long-time documenter of Peace House People and is one of the reasons I got involved there. His Love Story Documentarian tagline is, “Everything I make is a love story.” And it’s true. His Pandemic Postcard Project created 365 unique and whimsical postcards, mailing one a day to praise good people for good works. The art was a ritual of praise and gratitude and wonder. Do I know 365 good people?

Bob Stilger. Since college, Bob has been a curator of alternative periodicals and modes of navigating radical change. Studies in Japan began a global mission of creating spaces where people and communities can find new stories. After disaster, he observes, we come awake and find a way forward together, but we don’t have to wait to remake the communities and lives we want. He’s also co-founder and resident of Spokane’s Haystack Heights Cohousing sustainable village.