You ever feel like: “If I were just somewhere else, I really could have an impact on my community.”
For me, that place is the Greater-Nashville area.
In the Greater-Nashville area I had numerous connections. In many respects I still do. It’s where I grew up, after all. Where I had a number of people that knew me well enough to know they could rely on me. When you have a network like that, it may seem like it’s pretty simple to re-create connections when you move. In truth…it’s not.
Building a network is incredibly difficult, and takes time. It also requires you to swallow your pride and begin from the ground. That’s a struggle I personally face all the time. When most of your week is being a stay-at-home mother because the daycare situation sucks, it can get very daunting. And it’s VERY easy to get discouraged when you try to get out and connect with people, but they just don’t find you clicking with them.
Locally, that’s where I am. But I’ve found that I don’t have to be limited to the local community to help people. I’ve even discovered, over the last year, that I actually can be of use to an organization in the Greater-Nashville area…but even moreso because I keep trying to find opportunities to connect with people in my current local community. Though, that didn’t really come to me until last night.
While I was in conference with two council members of a non-profit organization in Nashville created to help end generational homelessness, I found myself tossing out ideas to help generate both Spiritual and Charitable support for the plight of the women this group wants to aide. Things that I never would have considered, had I not been paying attention to some Christian congregations in Anderson County, South Carolina. Some ideas springing forth from understanding the basics of Twitter, the problems with Facebook algorithms and even web design & analytics. I was, quite honestly, surprised at the things I was putting on the table and explaining for the women I spoke with.
In truth, the only reason I could do anything to help these women come up with ideas to take forward to the main committee, is because of our wonderful technology. So even though I cannot be there to directly work on the projects I believe would help them directly- I can do some work indirectly to support their efforts. Not just in the concept of ideas, but also in terms of research, and what little creative skills I have in arranging those things into a package (be it tweet to copy+paste, building a webpage, or even creating an inexpensive of press-packet they can distribute).
After I got off the phone with the women, I found myself returning to that statement at the beginning of this post- “If I were just in Nashville, I could really help this organization.” But as I looked at it more, I understood: I no longer need to feel bound by geography. As a team player, I have to put my trust in the other team members to carry the project. All I am meant to do, is to fulfill the role I have the capability to play.
In all of this, I’m reminded that the world will not get better if we believe we are not living to our personal potential. Instead, we have to work on giving what we can, where we can, and recognize the world will only get better if everyone is working on making it better.