Community Time Photo by Rob Amberg.
Woodworker selects materials in Western North Carolina.
The clock is always running. To tell the truth, yesterday would have been even better. But the Pew Partners told us that such thinking is wildly off, if not dangerous at times. Communities have natural rhythms of their own, and civic projects based on time lines and funding cycles that ignore these natural rhythms are much less likely to succeed. Collaborations, like any civic initiative, must figure out the tension between wanting to move full speed ahead and understanding a community's own time.