So, What's a Community Generalist?

Field Notes from the Skagit Valley

I've been trying to come up with a useful description of the work I do around the Skagit Valley.

The difficulty is that it doesn't stay in one category for very long.

On any given day, I might be helping somebody with an organizational problem, researching something happening in the community, working on a creative project, introducing people to one another, or discovering that two apparently unrelated activities have rather a lot to do with each other.

Sometimes the most consequential part of my day turns out to have been a conversation I wasn't planning to have.

I've begun calling this way of working Community Generalism.

But I'm hardly the only person doing it.

An unconventional education

I've spent most of my life developing abilities that turn out to be useful in community work. I only recently began to see how much those seemingly unrelated experiences had in common.

My earliest practical education came from the busy weekends at my paternal grandmother Sylvia's house, where relatives organized themselves into work crews for whatever needed doing. My grandparents, aunties, and uncles taught me how to contribute, how to do things well, and why.

As I grew older, I found similar lessons in performing arts, sports, independent study, household cooperation, hospitality, political organizing, caregiving, and experimental projects.

I participated in Junior Achievement, played saxophone in marching band, sang in school ensembles, and prepared for a vocal scholarship before leaving high school and eventually earning my GED.

My formal education never produced a degree. My informal education, on the other hand, has been rather difficult to stop.

I've independently explored subjects ranging from copywriting and journalism to psychology, sociology, neuroscience, physics, philosophy, and herbology. I still consider myself quite a novice in many of them, and I'm especially interested in what I can learn to put into practice.

I've also learned through experiences that don't usually appear together in the same story.

I developed a social facilitation method I call cracking the party code, refined in a wonderfully eccentric cooperative household called Tippity-Witchety.

I worked with the Radish Collective to build the Radish Infoshop, a radical lending library, bookshop, community center, social and meeting space, and internet café. I also organized music fundraisers and public activities, explored independent media, and learned how to have more humane disagreements with people whose political convictions differed considerably from my own.

I've cared for children, households, gardens, and an off-grid lavender farm where I experimented with permaculture, survival shelters, art, and making useful things from whatever materials were available.

I'm not an expert in all of those things. Far from it.

But I've learned how to learn, organize, collaborate, recognize opportunities, and find people who know things I don't.

Holding Space for Community

When I moved into Ridgeview Terrace in Mount Vernon, I joined a neighbor in helping make our community room an accessible shared resource rather than a place that stayed locked until somebody reserved it.

She announced her new art group in the community room newsletter. I immediately felt compelled to propose a game night I called Friday Fun and Games. Together, we developed activities with our neighbors, and I held resource-navigation and tech-help hours on Mondays. My neighbor has continued developing that shared space into a well-maintained center of community activity, complete with seasonal collaborative art exhibits.

It was another example of something I'd seen throughout my life. Give people opportunities to participate, practical access to resources, and some room to develop their own ideas, and interesting things can happen.

These days, Skagit Clubhouse has become one of the most important places in my life. I'm a member, and it's where I began some of my most authentic friendships in the Skagit Valley.

I'm involved in developing the Clubhouse Media Lab with other interested members. I'm also preparing to onboard interested members to a Systems Lab deployment that I'm experimenting with at the Clubhouse, with permission. Clubhouse members can make their own opportunities to help shape how the Clubhouse evolves. So, I'm bringing my interest in sociotechnical environments to that work.

Sociotechnical is an elaborate word for something fairly practical: how people, organizations, and technology work together to accomplish things.

I also do work for the PFLAG Skagit board, including website development discussions, and attend its meetings.

Some of my most interesting work happens where these relationships overlap.

Sarah, the Clubhouse's executive director, has arranged limited after-hours access for community group gatherings I'm involved with, provided I supervise their use of the space.

The remarkable thing is how much can emerge simply from participating in community life, developing relationships, and recognizing an opportunity when it appears.

My other office is the sidewalk

I walk and use public transportation almost everywhere I go.

I also spent several years houseless in Mount Vernon, developing relationships with street communities that remain important to me.

As a result, I'm continually moving through different parts of the valley, helping people find their way, connecting them with resources, distributing wellness and safety supplies, and learning what people are experiencing.

I like knowing what's happening around me, what people are working on, and what possibilities may be developing that nobody has quite recognized yet.

Sometimes that knowledge becomes directly useful. Sometimes it helps me better understand the communities I'm involved in.

Both matter.

A little more about me

I'm a trans woman in the early stages of transition.

I'm also an autistic plural system called the Tiaria System. My experience of plurality is a form of dissociative identity disorder.

These are parts of my experience that have influenced how I understand identity, participation, belonging, and the institutions that organize opportunities for people. I've found that most of those institutions aren't a good fit for me.

I've spent a considerable amount of my life navigating circumstances that don't fit other people's expectations particularly well.

Perhaps it's unsurprising that I've become interested in creating more possibilities for people whose abilities and circumstances don't fit conventional categories either.

What ties all this together?

I keep returning to the same question: what can people make possible together?

Think about the people who organize activities, help their neighbors, share knowledge and resources, and generally make themselves useful wherever they happen to be.

Some have spent years developing abilities that other people may barely notice, except when those abilities are suddenly needed.

Calling something volunteering doesn't tell us very much about what people know or how their contributions affect the people around them.

What have they learned? What relationships have they built? What are they curious about?

And what might become possible if those contributions were easier to recognize, connect, and build upon?

I'm particularly interested in people whose abilities cross several disciplines, who move between different environments, and who help others put their own abilities to use.

I've met quite a few of them.

I don't assume that everyone approaches community participation as I do, or even wants to put a name to it.

But I keep finding that the connections between people, their interests, and their abilities are worth paying attention to.

Where does Catalyst Guild come in?

There are currently two official members developing Catalyst Guild: Kaliko Johnson and me.

I'll let Kaliko introduce himself in his own time.

One of our experiments involves recognizing and supporting the kind of cross-disciplinary community work I've been calling Community Generalism.

I have a Community Generalist assignment through Catalyst Guild. I'm also developing several projects, including some creative and media initiatives we're incubating.

Those projects have their own purposes. What links them in my work is an interest in developing community capabilities through participation, relationships, research, cooperation, and practical assistance.

And it certainly isn't limited to Guild members.

For my own part, I'm trying to make this kind of work sustainable as a livelihood without losing the freedom to follow useful opportunities wherever I encounter them.

It would be rather nice if I didn't have to invent an entirely new occupation every time I found something interesting and useful to do.

I don't expect other people to define their contributions the way I define mine. I'm more interested in making room for what they want to explore and accomplish.

I don't have all the answers.

That's why it's an experiment.

Why I'm writing about it

I'm developing my work as a community journalist, and I want this journal to follow what I'm doing, learning, and questioning as a Community Generalist.

You'll find accounts of my work, stories about the places and communities I've participated in, investigations into their histories, and the occasional experiment that goes somewhere completely unexpected.

I also expect to introduce other people whose ways of working and participating have something in common with mine, without trying to fit everybody into one definition.

And I hope Kaliko and other contributors will share their stories and journalism in their own voices.

I'm interested in documenting things while they're happening, rather than waiting until someone has assembled a tidy retrospective explaining what everybody accomplished.

Sometimes an experiment doesn't work. Sometimes relationships change. Sometimes the thing you thought you were building turns out to have been a way of discovering something else entirely.

That seems worth writing about.

Perhaps there's a place for you in this experiment

If you're a student wondering how to put what you're learning to use, someone whose circumstances require you to stay home but who can connect with the world through the internet, or a community elder contemplating a second, third, or even fourth act, I'd be interested in hearing from you.

Perhaps you've accumulated years of experience that nobody has thought to ask about. Perhaps you're curious about something you haven't had an opportunity to try. Or maybe you'd simply enjoy working with other people on something that matters to your community.

You don't need a formal role, a polished plan, or an impressive collection of credentials.

Tell me what interests you, what you've learned, or what you'd like to explore. You can reach me through the Catalyst Guild Welcome Desk at info@catalystguild.org.

We're still developing opportunities to participate, and many of the ideas on this website aren't functioning programs yet. But a conversation seems like a perfectly reasonable place to begin.

So this is where I'll begin: documenting the community work I do, the people I meet, and the experiments that grow out of it.

I suspect the Skagit Valley will provide plenty of material.

And perhaps we'll eventually figure out what a Community Generalist is supposed to put on a business card.

I've been working on that, too.