#ecg2016

Intentionality is the center of moving forwards. So, despite not making my destination the night before I was, thanks to the wonderful Ronnie, able to begin where I had wanted and proceed along my scheduled timeline. 

Along the way we chatted gender a bit more - about the idea of femininity and masculinity - how the terms can be off-putting and quickly revert to gender expression in terms of clothes or body presentation. I bid farewell to my gracious host a few blocks from Flexit Cafe, where I stopped to check in on the digital world before hustling along. Generally cafe’s like this are not in my budget - but the owner clearly had his head in reality when he priced a normal cup of coffee for just one dollar. Blessed are the coffee shop owners who do not price-gouge. 

I stopped at the Courthouse Gallery - best use of a court house I have ever seen! - just outside of town to enjoy some of the sculptures before continuing over the rolling hills of Maine. Came across perilous intersections and stopped to chat with a woman who wanted to know whose idea it was to put the bicycle path down her steep hill into a dangerous intersection instead of continuing along Rt 1 where there was much more to see. She told me in her town of Orland is where the American and African tectonic plates smash together - right along route 1. Wouldn’t that be a great site to see instead of a dangerous hill that could be the site for a terrible accident?

While passing through Bucksport I stopped to take pictures of a community center and ran into the Community and Economic Development Director, Richard Rotella. He invited me in and explained the cafe-style space decorated with artwork and community goals. The town is 8months into a 2year discussion on how to deal with transitions in the community. The mill, which has supported the town for so long, is set to close and the townspeople are coming together twice a month to envision what sort of future they would like. He has only been the C&ECDirector since October of 2015 and had filled 10 of the 11 open storefronts on Maine Street. Mostly with women owned businesses too. We chatted about the 5th World Conference on Women and wondered how many of the town’s businesses had been owned by women, and the number of women leaders in the community, compare to when the last conference took place in 1995. He wonders how the changes since then compare to other communities as well. This got me thinking to other measures of change for the status of women - business owners, community leaders (the types of leaders and different ways to “wield power”), the types of work women were doing then compared to now. 

These thoughts continued as I resumed my journey south to Belfast to meet a friend. I recalled a conversation with Mike in CT-DCF about a specific community that decided to make their space family-oriented and the ripple effect that had on the community - down to improved grades across the board for the community’s children.