My teenage daughter began going to a chiropractor about the same time I turned 50. As I was surveying the bones of my life, she was learning that her bones -- we could see on the X-rays -- were not lining up properly. That structural deficit was causing her pain and contributing to repeated running injuries, depriving her of a source of joy in her life. The fix was to get the bones into alignment and strengthen the muscles around them to help keep them there. She had to learn where the laggardly muscles were and then call them into action by disciplined exercise, night after night. The pain is gone and she's running again.
Wherever I go, whomever I talk to, whatever I read these days, this matter of structure pops up.
Even if their own circumstances leave little to be desired, citizens I talk with don't like how things are lining up in their community, the nation, the world. They're taking choice seriously, deciding to do some things differently in their own lives. They're shifting their perspectives, refusing to accept the limitations and injustice of "business as usual," adopting structures that better express their values and support their hopes. And they're learning skills and strategies to keep new structures in place.
Examples abound.
When I visited my son and daughter-in-law in Eugene, Ore., last fall, we went to the corner bagel shop for Saturday morning breakfast. It was a colorful building situated on a jaunty diagonal with a line of customers spilling out the door. Good coffee. Dense, nutty whole grain baked goods. I noticed that the adjacent dining room, though being used, seemed like it didn't quite belong to the bagel shop. My son explained that the space was used by two businesses: bagel/bakery/ coffeeshop by morning, Mediterranean restaurant by night. A new structure. How cool is that?
A friend of mine recently told me she and her lawyer husband crunched the numbers and figured out how to shorten time to retirement by making a number of changes in their self-employed lives. Among them was a decision to close the professional office in town and work from home.
Now, with the aid of his laptop, the attorney makes house calls to clients. With the exception of an occasional over-friendly dog or home where someone smokes, it's worked extremely well for the type of law he practices and is easier on resources all around.
Susan Schmidt owns a 50-acre organic farm in Medina County. A widow, she began some years ago to raise honey and vegetables because she wanted to work at home. Five years into organic certification, she decided something needed to be different. "I was about killing myself farming," she said.
Working through FarmLink, an initiative of The Countryside Conservancy's Farmland Center, Schmidt found Jessica Levine, an experienced grower seeking a bigger farm opportunity.
"I was committed to having my land be an organic farm," Schmidt said during a workshop at the 29th Ohio Organic Conference last month in Granville. "With Jessica, I get to help her. I get to think about backing off and letting go ... and get to step out of my comfort zone and do something new."
Schmidt talked hopefully about her next project -- creating a commercial kitchen in a restored barn that also has room for a community space, a place where she can share "what has been shared with me already. I find that whatever you give away comes back to you ten-fold."
"I get to explore what I'm capable of at a high level without all the risks," Levine said, calling their liaison of convenience less a "straight-up business deal" and more of a partnership. Neither one knows exactly what formal arrangement will result from their "link." They are taking their relationship out for a test run in a process they said is aptly described as dating.
Down in Athens County, grass-based dairy farmers Stacy Hall and Bill Dix are thinking about retirement. With no heirs, they're dating too, working with FarmLink to find someone to which they can transition their piece of paradise and its very successful seasonal dairy. Hall said she is looking for "farm business skill seekers" rather than people who want to buy a farm. ("If you just want a farm, you need a Realtor," she said.) So she's looking at a process that involves mentoring and skill sharing over time.
A new effort (2007) of The Countryside Conservancy that officially serves 14 counties, including Ashland, FarmLink accepts inquiries from retiring or exiting farmers, beginning or expanding farmers and farmers interested in partnering with others. Its underlying goals are to address what the Conservancy has boiled down to four basic problems in this part of the state: Insufficient supply of locally raised food to meet growing demand, not enough new growers to offset the wave of retirees, loss of prime soil to pavement and inability of the Office of Farmland Preservation to fund applications for conservation easements.
FarmLink offers a structure for farmers and landowners to meet beginning or expanding farmers, and provides information and support throughout the process. A range of options for transfer are considered, not just outright sale, and the program also is also creating new muscles so it can support to "linkees" on business planning, market access, subsidized loans, succession planning, tax benefits, equipment purchase and a range of related topics. Communication, not surprisingly, is paramount.
These ways of conceiving and doing business harken back to times when communities were the safety net, not money.
