Goodbye for Now! Your Questions Answered: April Q&A

Remembering our Purpose, Reflecting, & Looking Ahead

Question 1: “ What was the original intention of Village Voices, and how would you reflect on this publication journey?”

Anytime you start a big journey, you realise you’re telling a story. With our first Village Builder Cohort, we could feel the seeds of that narrative. Village Voices became the space to share stories from the cohort, inspired by weekly experiences of builders and VillageCo volunteers throughout the 6-month program.

Part story-telling and part documentary, we wrote to engage our Village community as well as inspire our future selves by capturing our reflections and acknowledging everyone we’ve met along the way.

Village Voices being our first external newsletter, we had set a clear intention of our goal, however, we dove into it quite blindly. This process (or lack-there-of) actually enabled a creative playground where anyone from our Communications Circle (and beyond) could pick up their proverbial pen and write. We experimented with research-based articles, interviewing Builders, sharing ideas; we also wrote some personal stories that gave us a window into a volunteer’s life or a builder’s project.

The common feature and intention for each article is our desire for them to be informative, engaging, and most of all come back to the importance of community and caring for another, including ourselves. Each article had a series of questions that acted as ”food for thought”, a moment to reflect on the article and an option to engage by commenting.

We are so grateful for everyone who read, engaged, reposted and supported this project!

Meet our Authors!

Christine Francis , Jason Sears, Kevin Triplett

Loisel Wilson, Eva Stone, Christine Callo

Question 2: “I heard you’re taking a pause - is that right? How come?”

Village Voices was born out of our intention to document our pilot Builder Cohort and support our builders journeys, and the newsletter launched at the same time of the Cohort kick-off in October. On April 28th, the 6-month pilot program officially ended and so it seemed to make sense to also take a pause with Village Voices.

While Village Voices will continue, a little break will give us to reflect on the last 6 months, spotlight key moments and celebrate our builders for all of their community initiatives - in however way they showed up, at whichever stage or milestone they have experienced in this ongoing endeavor of community-building.

We also want take time to applaud everyone else who made it possible – our coaches, VillageCore leaders, and our Evaluations team who interviewed and got to know all the builders. We celebrate you.

So back to the question – we have published A LOT of articles. This is our 24th article in 7 months - that’s quite an achievement! These articles are rich with stories and information we’d like to harvest and creatively materialize in other avenues and ways.

Question 3: “What’s next for Village Voices?”

We feel proud of what we wrote and shared. Many of the articles we posted captured complex ideas, and told personal stories, all related to our larger mission of building local communities.

We plan to lift up these stories and find creative ways to resurface them for our supporters and champions.

For example, we may ask each of the authors to pick some of their favorite posts and write a brief reflection on the article. These reflections will be shared along with the original posts to extend our reach.

The articles will also be a source for training and orienting volunteers and builders within the VillageCo community. For instance, our “On Relating and Connecting” articles written by

Christine Francis

are great to help people new to Village understand why we place relationships at the core of our work. The article on Role Taking helps new-comers to Village understand the main roles behind a gathering and why each is critical to the self-sustaining structure.

The stories about builders may also be updated in the months and years ahead to reflect their journey. For example, our first builder spotlight on Stephen Michael was written before he launched Village NYC. Now, he has held several gatherings. We might write a part 2 “Where are they now?” article…

We knew all along when we started Village Voices that it was special. And now that we’re entering this new phase, we’re grateful for the effort we put in and will continue to receive benefits from this publication.

Thank you for being a part of our Village Voices journey!

Now it’s your turn to add your voice:

• What were your favorite Village Voices articles?

• What stories do you have from your experiences with Village?

• With whom may you share a link to Village Voices?
  

Bye for now!

The Village Voices, VillageCo Newsletter Team