Sarasota Livin'

Truer words were never written about community development work. This jewel was in the Florida West Coast RC&D newsletter. Laura was that you writing the Coordinator's Corner.

You Can't Eat Pie in the Sky

Community work is like making a pie as a team. The pie sounds so yummy, right? Promises of a family-secret recipe, homemade crust, fresh fruit...oh yeah, everyone's mouths are watering. It's going to be the best tasting pie ever -- but only one problem. It's in the sky.

Ok, well, let's build this pie then in real life. Together as a community, which of course will be the best pie because that's what we read in books about teamwork. More heads are obviously better than one. So we get to work on pie building.

First order of business is the type of pie, then the type of recipe, then the differences in family traditions of recipes, choices of ingredients (salted butter, unsalted butter, or Crisco?). Oh man, can we just make two pies? No, we only have one pan (ok, so like pie-building on Survivor!). As we press onward, some people become not so happy, other people are thrilled. As negotiations on the recipe evolve, the thrilled end up not so happy while the formerly unhappy are now less unhappy.

Now, it's more important than ever to stick together, because we are all getting hungry. What a team does at this point is critical. To the remote observer, it would seem obvious that there is nothing that matters more than the edibility of the pie and the willingness of the team to eat it!!!

CAN WE DO IT? Can we admit that a perfect pie is already not on today's menu? We are hungry and grouchy, but we have committed to working together on this pie and we are not even done with the recipe. So here's my advice: Let's take our ingredients before they get stale and make an edible pie for today as a first step. No one should try to do community work on an empty stomach and if the pie is edible, we can still survive to make improvements tomorrow.