Dear Michelle,

I hope this finds you well. I am sending this letter to one person per week for 52 weeks. You are the seventh.

A. Please locate and obligate yourself to someone who lives on thin ice in Savannah. Find ways be appreciate each other. Find ways to question the status quo. Imagine growing old together. Seek Solidarity. Learn as you go, then …

B. Please think of three people you know in Savannah and ask them to do A and B as well.

C. Hold onto this letter until you do A and B. When done, send the letter back to me. No hurry, just sometime in 2010.

I won’t bore you with details, but you are welcome to call me at 912-236-5798, or email me at tomkohler@bellsouth.net or find me on Facebook or at the Sentient Bean for coffee.

Tom Kohler

After sending about a dozen of these, we had a couple of phone calls. Not from people to whom we had sent letters, but from people we know and who know our work. One was from Rev. Liam Collins. He had met a man with a who was living a hard life on an SSI check of few hundred bucks a month and asked if we might help the two of them think about some possibilities.Yep, we can do that.

The second call was from Clete Bergen, an attorney we know. He asked us to lunch and brought someone with him who “was being a citizen advocate without knowing it.” I listened to her story and helped her think about how to engage other people in the story. We can help her in some other ways as well.

The letter and the two stories are part of a culture of caring that we promote. A culture of people caring about and for one another. A culture of caring about who is left out, and who we need to be a little extra intentional about inviting in.

Now, with the benefit of age and experience, both have come to see service to others as their highest call. Billionaire Turner’s heroes have shifted from the warrior Genghis Kahn to peace makers Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. Baseball legend Aaron cares more about the number of kids his Foundation has helped with college scholarships, than his home run record.

One might walk away with the idea that the first 50 years of one’s life is to be solely devoted to making one’s personal climb to the top. Once there, the luxury of service to others avails itself. This reading of the evening’s message would be unfortunate for all concerned.

Here are a few questions that we might ask ourselves after hearing Turner’s and Aaron’s message:

• How much of the service I offer within the community is personal vs. professional?
• How much of the service I offer within the community guides me outside of my corporate comfort zone?
• How much of the service I offer within the community draws me closer to people who live lives different than mine?
• How much of the service I offer within the community is freely given rather than quid pro?
• How much of the service I offer within the community encourages an egalitarian community rather than elitist community?
• How much of the service I offer within the community involves my hands and my heart more than my wallet?
• How much of the service I offer within the community is transforming me?

If we are to accept the insight Hank Aaron and Ted Turner offered on Saturday evening, we should all begin to invest ourselves personally and directly in the lives of people whose climb is tougher than ours. Don’t wait.

A personal note of thanks to Don and Kaye Kole for the invitation and hospitality during the evening.

Do you believe that EVERYONE and EVERY LIFE matters? Do you think that people should take care of one another no matter what obstacles may interfere? Are you not afraid to challenge the status quo? If so, you must come and hear Tom Kohler and Susan Earl tell the story of Savannah native, Waddie Welcome and the Beloved Community. Chatham-Savannah Citizen Advocacy is the host for a short evening of informative discussion about how you can help Savannah become a community where we help one another.

Wendell Berry’s presentation about economics - home economics- is built on more fundamental understandings of the long cycles of life than anything I read in The New York Times, or Commentary or The Wall Street Journal. This long view puts the day’s headlines in perspective.

In Berry’s view, local is essential. Local food growing and consumption, local banking with investor, banker and customer being seen as part of the same weave of community and local responsibility, including people trying to care about and for one another.

Berry believes and articulates the notion that affection for a particular place and people creates community and that community is, in the long arc of things, the fundamental building block of a culture capable of sustaining itself and its people.

Two questions we ask in citizen advocacy - What can people come to mean to one another? What can people come to mean to the greater good?- are questions that freshen and strengthen the soil of community. Berry’s deep understanding of the connection good land use, what is now called sustainability, and good community life builds a wide and strong bridge between our work and the great young people of Savannah who consider sustainability an important issue. Berry’s world view link pulls us up under a big good umbrella.

Storymaking is a mixture of moments of clarity surrounded by times of confusion and uncertainty. Citizen advocacy stories, stories that show what happens when people choose to look for ways to become important in one another’s lives, feels more like “stumbling forward together” than “marching down a clear and wide road.” There is a lot of flailing and failing mixed in with some good news.

Storytelling is different. In storytelling, a storyteller has to find the path and bring the listener down the path. The storyteller’s task is to frame and focus a big complicated story in a way that it can be heard, understood and taken to heart by the listener or reader.

A well-told story can be instructional and inspirational. It can also be a little daunting and lead to an “I couldn’t do that!” sort of reaction.

So as you listen to citizen advocacy stories, please don’t think that the storymaking felt the way the story-telling feels.

Storymakers feel more like people stumbling forward together for many years…

Storymakers are people who are just trying, as advocate Chuck Jones says, “to do the next right thing.”

Do you believe that EVERYONE and EVERY LIFE matters? Do you think that people should take care of one another no matter what obstacles may interfere? Are you not afraid to challenge the status quo? If so, you must come and hear Tom Kohler and Susan Earl tell the story of Savannah native, Waddie Welcome and the Beloved Community. Chatham-Savannah Citizen Advocacy is the host for a short evening of informative discussion about how you can help Savannah become a community where we help one another.