*cino Work, Education, Event, People, Three Rivers

*cino hosts Weekly Witness for Peace in October and November

“Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release all bitterness. Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won.”

– John Lewis, Across that Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity. It is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of…justice. It is about a revolution of love that is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free.”

– Shane Claiborne, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals

Times of powerful division and anxiety call for powerful expressions of peace and compassionate action. Throughout human history, those committed to the hard work of building peace in community have found hope and strength in simply standing together as one. As a humble expression of peace, each Tuesday in October and the first Tuesday in November, the Huss Project will host a physically-distanced half hour of silence outdoors from 5:00-5:30 p.m.

Participants are welcome to take whatever posture of prayer, meditation, or reverence is most comfortable for them; there is no specific religious affiliation. For those who would like to keep their bodies moving in silence, there will be a couple of short walking paths around the Huss Project property.

Logistics

  • Please park in the main parking lot and visit the blue tent by the main entrance to Huss to check in. Kindly bring a mask to wear at check-in, but feel free to remove masks when physically distanced out on the property during the silence.
  • Silence will be observed outdoors no matter the weather, so please come prepared for the day’s forecast.
  • If you’d like to sit, please bring your own chair or ground covering.
  • A bell will sound to mark the beginning and end of the half hour. If you can only attend a portion of the time, please come!

If your organization would like to be a community partner for this event, please get in touch before September 28. All are welcome to participate in this series of events, in hope and solidarity for a community of flourishing for all.

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*cino Work, Hospitality, Leadership, People

Growing our community safely in a pandemic

In mid-March, as Michigan pulled together and hunkered down to slow the spread of the coronavirus, our *cino crew was watching and waiting to see how our plans to welcome new people into our community this spring might change. We had a couple from Vermont planning to move into our new caretaker’s house, and we anticipated hiring seven new AmeriCorps partners—three year-long VISTAs and four summer associates—with several of these folks moving into our community house. With everything changing so fast and a growing awareness that the situation would continue for many months, we had no idea what to expect.

We continued our recruiting and hiring processes and eventually, AmeriCorps confirmed our May 11 start date for our new VISTAs. We were super excited about the three folks who agreed to join us, but how could we form a new household safely? And what would we do about the summer folks starting June 1?

So we started gathering the best, most reliable information we could and came up with a plan that we feel very good about. Because we’re a very visible group of people and because we want to maintain a sense of transparency and accountability with our broader Three Rivers community, we want to lay out some of the details of our plan.

  • As of March 16, all members of *cino’s four community households began practicing self-isolation, with distancing and other safety practices for any essential trips outside the house.
  • Thanks to adaptations allowed by AmeriCorps, our *cino staff began working remotely and our weekly community meetings shifted to video. We pivoted our work to support the acute needs of our local community with resources like emergency assistance information and free vegetable seeds.
  • When Dan and Margaret traveled from Vermont and moved into the Huss Caretaker’s House in mid-April, we welcomed them from a distance with a housewarming gift and video gatherings, while they spent their first two weeks here in self-isolation.
  • Our May 8 going-away party for two of our community house residents was a multi-faceted, creatively-distanced affair, with ways to participate by mail, text, e-mail, drive/walk/bike-by, and video. (We heard from several folks that it was the best going-away party they’d ever “attended,” so those of us who are trying to figure out how to do grad parties, showers, and so on this spring and summer: it is possible!).
  • New AmeriCorps VISTAs moving into the community house on May 9 self-isolated for two weeks prior to moving into the house.
  • As of May 9, the *cino community house at 208 N. Main Street started a “reset,” with the new group of residents self-isolating together for two weeks to establish a new primary household. During this two weeks, we’re conducting an orientation program through video and outdoor, physically-distanced points of connection.
  • For the foreseeable future, any new residents of the community house will self-isolate for two weeks before joining the household.
  • Our summer work is shifting almost entirely to fresh food production and distribution, so labor will be outdoors as much as possible with collectively designed safety practices based on the relationships among the individuals working together.
  • We’re working on a visual model that will help us all understand how we relate to one another practically and emotionally to support one another’s physical health, as well as the health of our relationships.

So why are we sharing all of this? Well, one of the challenges of this time is managing our feelings of anxiety, fear, and judgment, no matter our opinion of the pandemic response. We see a group of people gathered outside a house, clearly not residents of the same household: are they blowing off the rules? We see someone wearing a mask driving alone in their car: are they just trying shame me for not wearing a mask on my walk? In a time of such remarkable instability and uncertainty, judgment is a natural impulse, but we can practice giving the benefit of the doubt, asking genuine questions, and offering transparency.

We want our neighbors to know without a doubt: our *cino community is taking this thing seriously in the interest of supporting the health of our vulnerable family members, the essential workers with whom we come into contact, our partners at the Huss Project, our local healthcare workers—all our neighbors! When you see us out and about in our neighborhoods, working at the farm, staffing our new Saturday market at the Huss Project, we want you to know we’re taking good care for you, for ourselves, and for all of us.

Even though we’re tired of it already…

Even though the degree of risk is low…

Even though we’d love to hug our friend who’s moving across the country after two years here…

Even though we’d much rather get back to normal and throw a big party…

We will continue to practice intentional safety measures as long as we need to for the sake of public health and the common good.

If anyone ever wonders where we stand and what we’re doing to be safe together, please don’t hesitate to ask. This is going to be a long haul, friends, and we’ll get through it best with shared information, grace, transparency, and mutual respect.

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*cino Work, Education, Organization, People, Three Rivers

Three opportunities to join our work and community!

The past year has been a time of incredible growth for our organization, and we are thrilled to be recruiting folks to join us in our work here in Three Rivers, with three different levels of commitment. Whether for ten weeks this coming summer or for an open-ended period of time, folks will join the work of a friendly, passionate community of people collaborating for flourishing in our small, beloved, rural city. Read on for a quick snapshot of each type of position, and please help us spread the word!

 

Ten weeks: AmeriCorps Summer Associate (4 positions)

• Application deadline: May 1, 2020

• Dates of service: June 1 – August 9, 2020

• Summary of work: Educational programming and physical labor in support of Huss Future Fest (July 25), the Imaginarium, and Huss Project Farm

• Weekly commitment: 36 hours

• Compensation: Living allowance of ~$2,350, plus an educational award of $1,311

• Further details

• Apply here!

 

One year: AmeriCorps VISTA (3 positions)

• Application deadline: April 1, 2020

• Dates of service: May 11, 2020 – May 10, 2021

• Summary of work: Building organizational capacity through research, program development/evaluation, resource-building, and communications

• Weekly commitment: 40 hours

• Compensation: Living allowance of just over $12,000, plus educational award, health insurance, and optional reduced-cost housing ($250/mo.)

• Further details

• Apply here!

 

One year and beyond: Huss Resident Caretaker

• Application deadline: March 15, 2020

• Dates of service: Move in by May 1, 2020

• Summary of work: Building and seasonal outdoor maintenance at *cino properties, plus hospitality and community-building with Huss neighbors

• Weekly commitment: 15 hours (with optional paid additions)

• Compensation: Housing and utilities

• Further details

• Apply here!

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Leadership, People

*cino co-founder honored for servant leadership

On Friday, October 4, Rob stepped up to the microphone in College Mennonite Church in Goshen, Indiana, to address a crowd of Goshen students and alumni at the annual homecoming convocation. 15 years earlier, Rob could have been one of these students, filing in and taking a seat for the mandatory chapel service.

Except he probably would not have been there, not because he was playing hooky, but because as a returning older student finishing up his undergrad at Goshen, he was exempt from the chapel requirement. In fact, a Friday morning may well have found Rob staffing World Fare, the non-profit, volunteer-run fair trade store he helped start in Three Rivers, Michigan, where he lived while commuting to Goshen. Or maybe he was putting the finishing touches on the bi-weekly catapult magazine, an online publication he and others had founded in 2001. He may not have been sitting in a chapel seat, belting out the bass line of the morning’s hymn in true Mennonite fashion, but still, he was singing praises in the key most true to his nature: community development.

View the video from the 2019 Goshen College Homecoming Convocation above. Rob’s award and speech take place between minutes 17 and 30, and Minh Kauffman’s talk after Rob’s is wonderful as well. If you’ve never heard the loveliness of Mennonite part singing before, you’ll want to listen to the alma mater chorus starting just after 41:30—beautiful!

In his early 20s, “community development” was not the term that Rob used to describe the theme of his creative, entrepreneurial work, but his work in the Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies program at Goshen College was planting that seed in the soil of his intuitive organizational imagination. Even though moving back and forth between the worlds of a full-time college student and a married adult running two non-profit organizations was exhausting at times, the experience proved to sustain a delicate balance. While many of his peers in the PJCS program found themselves overwhelmed by the wounds of the world, Rob had a sense of purpose and meaning in practical work to address those wounds. The fair trade store was bringing the Three Rivers community into relationship with economically disadvantaged communities around the world, in an alternative trade framework that placed the flourishing of the most vulnerable people at the center. Through events and online publishing, *culture is not optional was calling its constellation of people of faith to deeper practice of social, aesthetic, and environmental values in everyday life, through storytelling and art. There was no time to wallow—there was work to be done!

Rob gratefully counts many of his Goshen professors among his inspirational models of integrated heart and mind, celebration and lament, prayer and work. One of those professors, Joe Liechty, has become a good friend over at-least-annual get-togethers for coffee at Goshen’s Electric Brew. Joe’s gifts of listening deeply with humility and working for change out of a spirit of love and longing have been hugely influential for Rob in his work in Three Rivers, and so it was especially honoring to discover that Joe had nominated him to receive Goshen College’s Young Alumni Award.

Which brought him to College Mennonite Church the morning of Friday, October 4. After Goshen College President Rebecca Stoltzfus presented him with the token of his award—a ceramic pitcher handmade by a local potter—Rob stepped up to the lectern. In the previous months, he’d been thinking back on himself as a student, full of despair and hope, and experimenting at the intersection of his sense of calling and the world’s need. What would he have needed to hear from a random speaker in a mandatory chapel service? Recalling his fellow students, whose despair at the state of the world drove many away from their faith tradition, and others who sidestepped the pain to embrace the status quo, he dug into the entwined roots of his Reformed and Mennonite influences to issue a challenge:

We need a robust imagination to realize the vision for the beloved community, loving the stranger and our enemies until we all become neighbors, and then loving our neighbors not just in theory, but in practice. The work is exceedingly difficult, but the vision for flourishing is enduringly beautiful. The world needs each and every one of you to help bring this vision into being, in whatever field you are in and in whatever place you choose to live. We need it now, ‘times being what they are: hard, and getting harder all the time.’ We need doctors, sociologists, and historians who are imagining solutions to high infant mortality rates in communities of color. We need bankers who are imagining pathways to home and business ownership for populations who have been left behind by gaps in generational wealth. We need farmers and eaters who are committed to the land, living out the connection between soil health and healthy communities. We need engineers who imagine new means of energy production as we stare down an uncertain future for our planet. We need journalists who lift up the value of the voices of the voiceless. We need politicians who set policy based on the care of the least of these, neighbors and strangers, reminding us that ‘justice is what love looks like in public.’ And in the end, we all need each other to imagine and live into a vision of neighborliness that is nothing less than kinship, which, as Father Greg Boyle articulates it, is not serving the other, but being one with the other. ‘Jesus was not a man for others, he was one with them.’ That is the beloved community, friends, and I am so thankful for the ways that Goshen College is growing that community through the formation of each of us.

This basic conviction—that we each have a calling to dismantle the causes of suffering and cultivate healing—was nourished in Rob by a great cloud of witnesses, living and dead, named and unnamed, and we can only hope the soil of the next generation is already seeded with the love to continue this good work in every place and in every field.

Goshen’s homecoming was a wonderful opportunity for Rob to reconnect with former professors and fellow students, and to be reminded of the important role of institutions like Goshen that are committed to non-violence as we seek to bring about flourishing for all in this world. Monday morning found him back at work in Three Rivers, completing the next iteration of *culture is not optional’s offering to that effort: a new community space designed to plant the seeds of sustaining friendships and lifesaving imagination through shared stories and experiences. Thank you, Rob, for your fierce, compassionate, creative vision and leadership in our community! May you be sustained in this work into the future with deep companionship, clarity, energy, and hope.

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*cino Work, Building, Fundraising, People

*cino purchases a new community house!

Over the past ten years, we’ve enjoyed our partnership with Trinity Episcopal Church through the use of their rectory for our community house. We’ve hosted 43 interns and resident communities members, dozens of volunteers, and countless dinners at the house. Now, we enter a time of transition, rejoicing with Trinity as they welcome a new pastor who will live in the rectory with his partner who is also a pastor. Together, they will serve three churches in our region, including Trinity, and we hope to count them as our neighbors for many years to come.

While the timing of a major housing transition on top of our Imaginarium work, starting a new AmeriCorps program, and the farm season ramping up has seemed curious, we can’t deny that an amazing opportunity has presented itself. As of April 1, *cino is the owner of a beautiful Victorian-era home on Main Street, just north of downtown Three Rivers!

As you can see from the photo, this five-bedroom house needs a lot of work, but it has solid infrastructure, abundant space, and lovingly preserved historic features. We are honored to become caretakers of such an iconic home in our community.

Rob has been coordinating a number of generous volunteers over the past few weeks to get the space ready for our current rectory residents and our AmeriCorps partners who will begin in May. We’re making excellent progress, but we could use your help. This transition represents a significant unexpected expense for *cino at a time when almost all of our resources are dedicated to the big Imaginarium project. Even so, we’re trying to do things right and make choices that will last for a long time. Would you be willing to pitch in with a donation toward supplies? To give you some idea of the scope of needs for this project and what your donation would provide:

  • $20: case of tile (40 needed)
  • $30: grab bar for accessible bathroom (6 needed)
  • $50: gallon of paint (30 needed)
  • $100: smoke/carbon monoxide detector (8 needed)
  • $150: toilet (3 needed)
  • $500: remove termite-infested trees (2 needed)
  • $5,400: emergency roof & soffit work (only 1 section needed so far—thankfully!)

Beyond these immediate needs, we’ll be looking toward further interior improvements to the second floor within the year, as well as restoring and painting the exterior—no small task! With your help, we look forward to fostering deep, long-lasting community in this new space and we hope we can give you a tour in person before too long. Thank you for your partnership, in whatever form it takes!

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Uncategorized

Now accepting apps for year-long AmeriCorps VISTA positions!

We have some great news! Starting in May, we’ll have three full-time AmeriCorps VISTA positions for people who will help us take our work to the next level in the areas of food systems, education, and economic development through the Huss Project, World Fare, and other partners in Three Rivers.

Experience with activities like social research, community development, event planning, education, program development, volunteer coordination, permaculture design, food systems, non-profits … these are the types of things we’re looking for in people who will thrive collaborating at a high level with a grassroots org in a funky, small, Midwest city. We’re looking for people with solid enough experience to function as peer collaborators in creative design toward significant community outcomes, in a spirit of curiosity, joy, and accountability. Here are four words that are floating around for us at the moment as we search:

  • Compassion
  • Collaboration
  • Innovation
  • Detail-orientation

Visit our listing on the AmeriCorps site to submit your application. Applications are open until April 15, but we’re looking to fill these positions as soon as possible to allow our VISTAs to plan for the mid-May start date. The compensation package includes:

  • A living allowance (just over $12,000/year)
  • An educational award (or end-of-service stipend)
  • Health insurance
  • Reduced-cost housing

Thank you for your help in spreading the word and please let us know if you have any questions! We’re really looking forward to this next phase of our community’s work in Three Rivers.

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*cino Work, Leadership, Organization

2017 *cino community retreat coming up this weekend

Each fall for the past several years, the *cino core community members have gathered at a cozy house outside of town to reflect on the past year and look ahead to the next. In the past, we’ve invited in a friendly facilitator to help us explore our personality types and how they work together, and engage good questions about the interaction between our work and our selves.

This year, we’re keeping it simple with a self-guided retreat. As we’ve noted on the *cino web site and Topology Magazine, 2018 is going to be a year of slowing down, for Rob and Kirstin specifically, but that will have ripple effects for our entire group and the organization’s work as a whole. We’ll be discerning what to maintain in 2018 and what to let lie fallow, including what kind of community we need to build for the year to sustain the things we are committed to with a sense of healthy balance and wholeness.

Surrounding the discussion times will be plentiful amounts of hanging out, reading, eating, walking, and playing together. We always look forward to this time of renewal for our work and our relationships, and greatly value your prayers for discernment, wisdom, and joy as we head into some important conversations this weekend.

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*cino Work, People

A season of rest

Online and print publishing, annual camping conferences, intentional community, speaking engagements, a daily quote, summer festivals, storytelling nights, internship programs, service learning groups, an urban farm, maintaining an old elementary school building … The work of *cino has taken many forms over the past 16 years. In the past several months, it’s become clear that a prominent form for the next little while needs to be: Sabbath rest.

Kirstin and Rob, co-founders of *culture is not optional, will be observing 2018 as a sabbatical year—not a stopping, but a significant slowing down, and the *cino community is in discernment about what would bring joy to maintain through the coming year. Some initiatives will be put on hold for the year, including Topology Magazine, the daily asterisk, the summer internship program, and service-learning groups. Others, like the urban farm at the Huss Project, will get more focused attention.

Throughout the sabbatical year, we will still maintain our community house with space for long- and short-term volunteers. If you’d be interested in spending some time in Three Rivers in the coming year, please get in touch. From all of our faithful friends and supporters, we ask for prayers as we pay attention to the call to make space in our personal and organizational lives.

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*cino Work

Looking back, looking forward

Greetings from Three Rivers, Michigan! Snow is falling here as the day comes to a close and the days get shorter and colder. The *cino community continues to move into winter mode, which means a shift from more social activities toward planning for the coming year, including fundraising and programming.

We know that many of you tend to make charitable contributions at the end of the calendar year, and we would be grateful if you’d remember our work as you do so.

What we’ve done in 2016…

  • In the past year, it’s been a joy to host so many wonderful, curious, thoughtful college students here in Three Rivers as part of our spring break service-learning program, summer internship, and even a self-directed household retreat for a group of students at our community house this past fall. The insights and experiences these students bring to our work here is invaluable, and their presence, even for a short time, is very encouraging to us and to our neighbors. We love hearing stories about the amazing things they’re going on to do in their college communities and the places they land after graduation. To learn more, check out the reflections from four of our summer interns: Tess, Lauren O., Lauren A., Aubrey, and Chelsea.
  • We’ve made some good progress on equipment and infrastructure this year, including our current project to install a large garage door in the former gymnasium at the Huss Project. This space has evolved to be our farm headquarters and a woodshop, creating a need for better access. We also purchased a used tractor that will be a great help with projects that need to be done on the land.
  • We completed our first full year of publishing Topology Magazine. New writers are finding us all the time, and we have appreciated hearing stories from so many corners of the world. Our editorial team, which is spread across three countries and now the ocean (check out Elisabeth’s dispatch from the sailing ship Tres Hombres) has been getting into a good rhythm of working together.
  • We’ve continued to build local relationships and partnerships through neighborhood programming and events. This year, the United Community Assistance Program, an ecumenical support network for low-income people, partnered with us on the Huss Project Farm and provided volunteer and financial support. We also introduced a gallery at Huss Future Fest that featured work from local artists, including budding young photographers from our neighborhood. And we set up new hives and partnered with some local bees for good pollination!

What we’ve learned in 2016…

This fall especially has reinforced for us the importance of building cross-cultural relationships in our community. Since 2009, *cino has been part of Three Rivers Area Faith Community (TRAFC), one of the few places in our community where black and white leaders are intentionally committed to working together across racial boundaries, which has also included gender, denominational, economic, and theological boundaries. We believe it’s critical for us to have places where we can hear the stories of people who are different from us. We’ve also identified a need to re-imagine some of our youth programming to foster deeper relationships, even while we continue to only have a seasonal presence at the Huss Project. We are eager for the day that we can be there year-round!

What we anticipate for 2017…

One of our first commitments for 2017 is to participate in the community march, meal, and service honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which is organized by TRAFC and has some amazing renewed energy this year. We’ve also created a draft of a plan for the land at the Huss Project and we will be working on implementing some major pieces of that plan, which includes more space for growing food and more easily accessible public play space. Having a plan on paper, even an early draft that will inevitably evolve, has already led to good conversations with our core group about ordering our priorities and coming up with some creative new ways to find the resources we need to continue moving forward. If you don’t have another opportunity to visit, you can see our progress at the annual Huss Future Festival on July 22—save the date!

At a benefit for the Standing Rock Legal Fund this fall, we heard an incredible slam poet who closed his set with a punch: “No hand claps necessary. Do the work.” It has quickly become a refrain for us: “Do the work.” We stand by our commitment to work for the flourishing of our Three Rivers community, and to train others to work for the flourishing of every place they find themselves. Thank you for your support, and for the good work you do in the place where you are.

Wishing you peace and joy,
The *cino community

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*cino Work, Building, Leadership, Organization, People

Annual *cino retreat yields 2017 priorities

On October 7, those of us who currently comprise the core *cino community gathered at a retreat house near Three Rivers to spend time growing in friendship, sharing good food, and reflecting on the year past and the year to come. Like our past retreats, we enjoyed times of intense, meaningful conversation interspersed with rest and play.

This year, our time together helped us get organized around some specific priorities for 2017 and some new ways of working together to achieve our tasks and goals within those priorities. The four things that rose to the surface that we want to work on in 2017 are:

  1. Grow *cino’s food efforts.
  2. Grow our core community in both quantity and quality.
  3. Cultivate relationships—with our neighbors, city, downtown, donors, partner organizations…
  4. Make tangible facility improvements.

We’ve identified a number of measurable goals within these overlapping categories, including existing programs and new efforts, as well as discerning some things we’ll leave behind for now in order to make space to grow in other areas and be open to the gifts and interests of new core community members. We’ll continue to organize our work through weekly meetings on Mondays, and also to grow in relationship with one another and our neighbors through things like Monday nights at the Riviera Theatre Bar and Friday night potlucks. We’re also looking to support each other more as a community through collaboratively developing and sharing our own personal care plans for the coming year.

Forming the foundation for our work conversations during the retreat was a time of reflection on several readings that touch on the theme of work: how we do what we are called to do with deep joy and gratitude. The readings included a couple of essays from our online publications (one by Brother Abraham and one by Gary Guthrie), a poem by Marge Piercey, and a quote from Thomas Merton that I find to be particularly cautionary for our busy, committed group:

There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist…most easily succumbs: activism and over-work. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work… It destroys the fruitfulness of his (or her)…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

We also considered a quote from Kahlil Gibran that echoes Merton’s warning:

Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is
better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the
temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter
bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.
And if you drudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge
distills a poison in the wine.
And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing,
you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of
the night.

With this balance in mind, we reviewed a first draft of a design for the Huss Project property, sharing questions and feedback. We know it will take a lot of work to move forward with this design, but we’re excited about the prospect of seeing some major progress happening in the coming year. To learn more about the design, visit a more detailed post with an image of the first draft over on the Huss Project web site.

If this all sounds like something you’d like to get involved in in some way, please let us know! We are very open to the participation of more volunteers and new core community members as we head into a new year full of good work alongside our neighbors in Three Rivers.

 

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