Deborah Fallows

Since Jim Fallows and I began traveling the country for American Futures and Our Towns nearly seven years ago, there has been one beat that began as a surprise to me and grew into the most heartening story I’ve witnessed of American resilience. That is the story of public libraries and how they have responded to the challenges facing American towns.

If you haven’t been in a public library lately, you probably wouldn’t recognize where you were if you entered one tomorrow. This is no longer, as I wrote early on, your mother’s library. The books are still there; the readers are still there; the librarians are still there. But sharing the same space are children busy with all kinds of active—and sometimes noisy—programs, inventors in maker-spaces, historians and amateurs researching genealogy, job-seekers scouring the internet, homeless people settling in quietly for the day, women and a few men heading to the yoga space, others watching movies, young entrepreneurs grabbing lattes, people considering the art exhibits, librarians helping others research a medical issue or housing issue or how to earn a GED, tutors helping school kids with math, people checking out hiking backpacks, fishing poles, wireless hotspots, snow shovels, and seeds for vegetable gardens.

And in their offices are the librarians and staff figuring out how to fill all these wants and needs of their communities and to anticipate what can possibly be coming to their town next, like a hurricane or, God forbid, a shooting. I saw many backroom views of libraries, from the depths of their groaning archives to their automated transport and delivery systems of books among libraries. I also ran into many pop-up versions of libraries in odd places from front yards to public parks to the middle of a lake.

After telling so many of their stories one by one, I wanted to show you what some of the libraries look like. These are my amateur photos of some of the libraries I’ve seen around the U.S., and even a few others I’ve visited around the world.

The libraries were in cities as small as Eastport, Maine, population 1,300, and as big as Columbus, Ohio, population 890,000. Most cities were in between in size, largely ranging from 10,000 to 65,000.  I also visited public libraries in Shanghai, population 24 million, and across Australia.

Here are some images that stay in my mind about libraries. This first of two collections features the children’s areas and the adult spaces. Coming up next will be what’s in the library beyond books, and alternative public libraries.

The first photo here is inside the Peavey Memorial Library in Eastport, Maine.

Children’s rooms: Whenever I asked directors or librarians about the most important efforts in their libraries, or their top dreams and aspirations yet to come, they invariably answered some version of: “It’s the children; it’s all about the children.” And they homed in on reading readiness or school readiness or child development, particularly for the kids who need it most. Attracting children, and their parents, into libraries is a prime mission.

Brownsville, Texas, built a wonderland of a children’s room and have newly gone all out into the ultra-modern space for teenagers.

A former Walmart has been transformed into the new and spacious McAllen Texas public library:

In my hometown of Vermilion, Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie, the children’s area is built on the nautical themes familiar to the kids who grow up there. (I spent many a summer day in this library, but it didn’t look like this.)

The San Bernardino Public Library’s central location has poured precious resources into the children’s room, hoping to attract many parents as well through their children and the offerings there. The collaborative mural featured world-renowned artist Phil Yeh.

The Hughes Main Library in Greenville South Carolina:

The Demopolis, Alabama, public library was formerly home to a furniture store and warehouse. The children’s area is part of its pride and joy.

The Deschutes Public Library in Bend, Oregon, changes the look of their children’s space from time to time. This one was all about superheroes.

The small Highland Park Texas Harvey R. “Bum” Bright Library  has a very cozy children’s room and a librarian who always directs children to the right books.

The Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, a branch of the New York Public Library in the Flatiron district, has a children’s braille collection.

Adult Spaces: The adult spaces in public libraries show an entirely different and often contrasting side of a public library. They range from extraordinarily elegant to cozy and welcoming, to dramatic, to waiting for that upgrade. Here is a sampling:

The mezzanine level of the public library in Demopolis, Alabama, in the former furniture store and warehouse, overlooks the California-craftsman style main reading room. Bill and Melinda Gates visited some 20 years ago as a kick-off to their philanthropic donations of computers to public libraries.

Inside the Linn-Henley Research Library of the Birmingham Alabama’s Central Library, the walls are painted with murals by Ezra Winter. They are some of the historic showpieces of the Birmingham library.

The State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia:

The reading room in the New South Wales public library in Sydney, Australia:

The reading room in Raymond M. Blasco MD Memorial Library, in Erie, Pennsylvania, overlooks the waterfront where the Tall Ships dock.

The McAllen Public Library in McAllen, Texas, has moved into the building of a former Walmart. The space for books is vast.

The Brownsville, Texas, public library creates much of their own artwork. These are the end panels on the shelves in the reading area.

Overlooking the atrium in the stately Shanghai Public Library, where I watched hundreds of people working on laptops and drinking tea, in the foreign-periodicals section:

The small Elk Rapids District Library in Michigan provides a room with a view for its readers.

During our travels to towns around the U.S., Jim Fallows and I have come across several artist-in-residence programs, for example in Ajo, Arizona; Eastport, Maine; and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here is the report from one of those artists, Richelle Gribble, on her experience of being an artist in a new place, how it fits into her practice of art, and how she sees her role in the community.

There is a second perspective of artists-in-residence, and it comes from the communities who host them. Why does a community bring an artist into its life? What do the artists and their presence bring to a town and the people who live there?

For that perspective, I went to Kristin McKinlay, who developed and directs StudioWorks, the artist-in-residence program of the Tides Institute & Museum of Art (TIMA) in Eastport, where Richelle Gribble worked. McKinlay and her husband, Hugh French, founded and run the formidable and influential TIMA, as our colleague John Tierney has written about here.

The inspiration for StudioWorks, McKinlay told me, was that a goal of TIMA was not only preserve history, but to “foster the creation of new work.” And for the town, the goals were equally lofty: to add to the cultural landscape, to bring a new energy, and to help revitalize the downtown. And for the arts: to support the work of artists.

The artist residency fit with the mission of TIMA, which also includes publications, like this stunning book on Eastport architecture, partnerships with other organizations, letterpress cards, a poster series, and education initiatives.

The Tides Institute launched StudioWorks in 2013. Since then, they have hosted a broadly diverse group of 57 artists from all over the world for stays of two weeks to two months. That number represents a big presence in Eastport, population 1,300. It also represents a big commitment, for 57 artists to travel the 250 miles “downeast” (north and east) from Portland or 115 miles east from Bangor. No one arrives in Eastport accidentally.

The program has grown through hard work and good luck. The Tides Institute bought and renovated a Water Street (the main street) storefront building for StudioWorks. As did many residents and tourists, Jim and I wandered in off the sidewalk early in our first of several visits to Eastport, to see and talk to Richelle at work. Soon, two houses were donated to the program, making for more living and workspace for the artists. Those were within a block of downtown and walkable to just about everything you might really want or need in Eastport. They also bought the old Free Will North Baptist Church, a building large enough to accommodate Undertow, Anna Hepler’s installation, which she describes as  “the hull of an empty ship in … the nave of an empty church,” which we also saw during a visit to Eastport.

The program is funded by foundations, grants, and private funding and provides a $2,000 per month (or prorated) stipend for the artists. Artplace America, a grantfunding organization whose imprint we have seen across the country, was an early supporter, and its impact is akin in a more modest way to Carnegie’s in libraries or the WPA projects in schools, post offices, recreation facilities, parks,  and so on.

The many artists brought many different perspectives to Eastport. Their work and connections have spilled out all over town; in schools, in library workshops, on the pier, along the waterfront, and door-to-door.

McKinlay rattled off descriptions of some of the projects, many of which engaged with the essence of Eastport as a town that is intimate—in every sense of its proximity, history, economy, and culture—with water. Eastport’s placemaking is inseparable from its water.

Here are brief descriptions of some of the work:

Elizabeth Bennett hung drawings off the working fish pier along Water Street, right across the street from StudioWorks. The high tides brought water that erased parts of the drawings as it came in.

Amanda Thackray made paper by hand using the local seawater, and printed on it the shapes of plastic garbage and marine trash that she found while walking along the coastline. Thackray wrote about her residency here.

Montana Simone, whom we met in Eastport last summer when we were there with an HBO film crew, preparing a documentary based on Our Towns, was deftly climbing and scrambling around the ramshackle old pier supports, next to the abandoned sardine canning factory. She wrapped two supports with huge canvases, leaving one in place for what would be two months to be marked and stained by the rising and falling tides.

Onya Hogan-Finlay and Kim Kelly hosted an event for the community that included a walk; a picnic with local food shared on a specially-created cloth screen-printed with images of seaweed and other regional flora; and a drawing session on paper letter-pressed with the event title  “Low Tide High Tea.”

Will Rose made animations about Eastport wildlife, and then followed up later from London for an artist talk with Eastport school kids via Facetime.

Adriane Herman, inspired from her interests in pollution, trash, left and reclaimed items, and her commitment to recycling, worked with found items, such as discarded books and papers. She took her passion into the community in a few ways. She worked with teachers and students at the school on many projects, from zine-making to exploring the local burn pile as a subject for artistic study. She also offered a workshop series at the public library, Peavey Memorial Library, and volunteered at the ultimate local recycler, Eastport’s thrift shop, New to You.

Seliena Coyle undertook a “selfie” project where community members took and developed self-portraits using pinhole cameras and a makeshift darkroom.

Alicia Eggert took 720 conceptual art photos spanning every single minute of a day from noon to midnight. She knocked on Eastport doors asking to photograph people’s timepieces—from grandfather clocks to microwave clocks to wrist and pocket watches. When Eggert asked for advice on how an artist with such a project might be received at the front doors, McKinlay answered, “The only risk is being invited in for pie.” By the end of the project, people opened their doors with the greeting, “We’ve been waiting for you.” One resident even lent Eggert his watch collection, saying she could fill in some missing minutes that way. McKinlay told me that this wide effort grew into a big wave of good public relations about the artist-in-residence program and contemporary art practice.

McKinlay and I also talked about the economic impact of the program. For those who remain skeptics about the positive economic impact that the arts can have on a town, here are some answers.

In Eastport, three abandoned buildings and a church have been renovated with local contractors and artisans into showpieces. The contractors become their own best marketers, displaying their products for future renovations from businesses and prospective homebuyers in Eastport. The buildings also then require maintenance, landscaping, and lawncare. A local high school student is employed as a year-round intern for the program. A few artists have brought young children with them, and used for-pay childcare in town while they worked. The artists-in-residence become part of Eastport tourism, including the considerable population of artists who live in town and galleries that display their work. The $2,000-per-month artist stipend is largely spent on local commerce.

McKinlay told me a touching story of how the artists can contribute to both the hard economics and the soft cultural spirit of the town.

Tracey Cockrell, a sculptor-in-residence, was building speakers out of seaweed and electro-conductive thread. She made field recordings around the region with a waterproof microphone. She went next door to the S. L. Wadsworth & Son Chandlery, the hardware store the artists frequent for supplies (and is also one of my favorite Eastport shops; you can find most anything there!), looking for Plasti Dip, a flexible rubber coating to waterproof her microphone. This time, the shop didn’t carry the product, but another shopper, overhearing the conversation, asked what color Cockrell wanted. She said she wasn’t sure yet. The next day, what should Cockrell find on the StudioWork doorstep, but a brown paper bag with the packages of Plasti Dip in every color. The good (and anonymous!) Eastport resident had driven more than 25 miles down the road to Calais and bought them for her.

We’ve seen artist-in-residence programs in a number of the towns we’ve visited. The first was in Eastport, Maine, where we ran into Richelle Gribble, a young artist based in Los Angeles, whom I consider an resident-artist extraordinaire. Over the past three and a half years, Richelle (as I’ll refer to her) has been an artist-in-residence in 15 different programs around the world, from a biosphere in Arizona to a ranch in Wyoming to the Arctic Circle in northern Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago. I’m not kidding about the Arctic Circle.

Richelle is an accomplished artist with pages and pages of a CV that includes solo and select group exhibitions, awards and fellowships, public collections, curated projects, public speaking engagements, memberships in committees and organizations, and publications. She is 28 years old.

When I was back in touch with Richelle recently, she had just returned from the Arctic Circle. I was interested in talking with her about the idea of residencies, how she approaches her time on location, what artists’ perspectives bring to a town, and what the experience brings to an artist.

We decided to talk about her residency in Japan, with its famously complicated culture, and where my husband, Jim, and I had lived for about two years back in the late 1980s, when our children were young.

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Here’s what we talked about: Along our own travels around the country for American Futures and Our Towns, many people have asked Jim and me how we start our reporting when we visit a town. It’s a fair question, and our answer is that we do some research ahead of time—and then once on scene, we spend a day or two talking to the “usual suspects” (journalists, school administrators, city-government officials, business people, librarians, people in the arts, etc.) and ask them about the interesting and compelling stories and issues in town, and about the people we should meet. Then we head out to connect with as many people in as many on-the-ground situations as possible.

I was interested in how this process worked for an artist-in-residence, so I asked Richelle the same questions: What does she do upon arrival? How does she build a sense of the place? How does that begin to translate into the art she makes? Her answers resonated with me.

Richelle told me that during her first few days or weeks in a town (depending on the length of her stay, which can range from a few weeks to a few months), she talks to lots of people in the community, engaging in conversation and listening to their language and forms of expression. She takes in the colors of the landscape and environment, looks at plants, wildlife, architecture, animal migrations, maps, photos, and the foods everyone eats. She gathers an understanding and a collection of the materials around—whether from beaches, forests, glaciers, or cityscapes. And she takes note of how the local art is made: what materials the artists use, and what their techniques and practices are. The latter were especially important, she said, as she began her international travels where the world of art could be so very different.

Then Richelle told me something that really hit home. She said she looks for recurring scenes, materials, or symbols that link one place to another, to show that all systems (social, technological, or physical) are linked around the world. This search for recurring patterns is something I did regularly via language when we visited new places. I would routinely write down interesting words or phrases that struck me—ones that surprised me or stood out. I would often make “word clouds” of a town, which taught me a lot about the culture of the place, and sometimes about universals. See a few examples here and here.

In meta-terms, these starting points build toward to her goal to reflect the community or its ecosystem through her art. She hoped to build a sense of what towns have in common and what sets them apart from each other. And ultimately, perhaps, to find a greater interconnection of communities and a sense of perspective of the planet. That is a tall order, but one she bears in mind as she works locally to reflect global themes.

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Yoshinogawa: Richelle spent two and a half months in the city of Yoshinogawa, Japan, a farmland community with a population of about 40,000. It is in the prefecture of Tokushima, southwest from Kyoto. The residency was no doubt a prized one, allowing her to work at the centuries-old Fujimori family’s Awagami Factory. Minoru Fujimori took over the family factory in 1945, and was designated a “Sixth Class Order of Merit, Sacred Treasure” by the Emperor in 1986 for washi paper work (a Japanese traditional craft). Minoru Fujimori died in 2015, but the family continues the age-old eco-friendly washi paper-making technique.

Richelle created an entirely new collection of artwork at the Awagami Factory, and she described to me the challenge of how to use the traditional materials and techniques in the contemporary art that she produces. It took some doing to try to replicate the traditional practices and mimic the gestures and movements involved, she said. Presenting her contemporary work to a community steeped and sophisticated in hallowed art forms, and explaining it through a translator, would be threading a needle of honoring the craft, reflecting the practice, and making her own art.

Richelle found, as did we when we lived with our then elementary-school age children in Japan for two years, that the local residents were very interested in visitors and their ways. She taught workshops in local schools, met the city’s mayor, and attended press events. The Yoshinogawa residents were interested in how she innovated and elaborated on the traditional work she learned about, and ultimately, the Western perspective through which she interpreted and produced her art.

Richelle described her main project: She used natural materials to make the pulp and produce a map, “painting the land from the land” she told me. She collected traditional kozo fibers, pounded them into the paper mixing with mountain water, and used natural indigo dye from the plants grown by the river. She wanted the residents to see themselves in her artwork, to be able to identify their own house within a larger map. It was her way of broaching the language barrier. If they couldn’t connect through language, she said, “we could share a place this way. (The art became) another way of understanding each other.”

She also produced art on a small scale, drawing images of the many gifts the residents presented her, such as plants from gardens, and fruits and vegetables from their yards. She took photos of her drawings and placed them on a map she drew of the area, which she described as “showing the personality of the town in a more micro-intimate way through gifts exchanged and found objects in the area. It serves as a key or legend to give identity to the larger maps.”

Richelle also told me a charming spider-web story. Always on the lookout for spider webs, Richelle spotted them as she walked around town getting her bearings and her map sense. She was noticed. Foreigners are always noticed in Japan, in our experience. If our little boys got temporarily lost in our Japanese neighborhood, neighbors—even ones I had never seen before—would bring them home, knowing exactly who we were and where we lived. One older man was watching Richelle looking for spider webs, and after a time, he offered to guide her along her walks about town, pointing out the webs he had spotted on her behalf.

Her art became a way to be something way more than a tourist, to open the door to a different kind of more intimate experience with the country. More like being a scientist or a detective, she described it to me. A common component of residencies is an open-door policy, where people in the town can stop by. For Richelle, this was valuable, as much of her work was driven by ideas and messages she took in from her visitors. And for those who drop by, she thought, it is one of the few times that people get to see what happens in the studios, to learn how involved the process of making art really is—seeing the incubating, testing, and interaction, as she described it, to create the final product. They see the process from start to finish.

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In 2008, National Geographic photographer Jodi Cobb and photographer and former Second Lady, Tipper Gore, talked about the role of photography at the then Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The evening was called “How Photos Can Change the World.” Eleven years later, their comments (as reported by David Schonauer in Popular Photography) remain relevant and powerful:

Cobb at one point hinted at the frustration sometimes felt by photographers with high aims. It is one thing to take pictures, she said, and another to do the kind [of] political “heavy lifting” that actually brings about change. Mrs. Gore replied that images are an essential part of the process ... [DF: emphasis added]

During our travels with Our Towns and American Futures, Jim Fallows and I have seen many examples where the arts—whether photography, downtown revivals, productions, or memorial parks—are an essential piece, and often a trigger, in the evolution of communities and the lives of those who make or experience it.

Over the years, a number of photography projects have focused on young people as the agents of such evolution or change:

• The 100cameras project, founded in 2009, began putting cameras in the hands of kids who have faced trauma or challenges. The idea was to use photography to help them work through their troubles.
• The Cameras for Kids Foundation gives kids in foster care cameras and lessons to help boost their confidence and skills.
• The Boys and Girls Clubs have long sponsored national photo programs.
• Since 1991, Fotokids also gives cameras to kids in Central America, with a goal to break the cycle of poverty with skills and creation.

Recently, I learned about a locally-grown version of these photo projects from the state of Delaware. It is called the Our Lens Challenge, and we’re naming it another in our series of Big Little Ideas. These are simple, replicable initiatives with far-reaching positive potential. Others in the series are here and here and here.

Here’s how this Big Little Idea works:

The Our Lens Challenge in the state of Delaware is an exercise for young people to use photography to engage with their communities about an issue or an observation that is important to them. High school students learn to make photos, try their hand, choose the best one of their photos, and describe how it captures a perception of their town.

As with other participatory public-arts initiatives that we have seen in towns across the country, this Big Little Idea is an opportunity to contribute a fresh perspective on a community that helps to tell its story. In this case, the bonus is to teach a valuable skill to young people and to invite them to be part of shaping and perhaps even changing the narrative of their hometown.

The Our Lens Challenge team has made it easy for anyone who is interested in trying their Idea, by preparing a set of YouTube videos to guide participants, step by step, through the process. In Delaware, the Challenge was presented as a contest, and the winners would receive a $100 gift certificate from Amazon. A number of groups in Delaware collaborated on the Challenge, although it could be replicated with a leaner operation in your town. Here are the collaborators:

• The Dual School is a program that supplements a school curriculum, to help students identify an issue important to them, and to act on it in a way having a positive impact in the community or world around them.
• Four Youth Productions is an organization that develops programs to encourage, inspire, and train young folks in hands-on ways. In this case, the program is about photography.
• At the University of Delaware, the Human Development and Family Sciences Department, the Horn Entrepreneurship Program, and the Partnership for Arts and Culture teamed up in a Community Engagement Initiative where undergrads could meet with young photographers and help understand how to use social media to promote their work.
• The Delaware Community Foundation (DCF), whose mission is to help build strong communities around the state, was a catalyst and supporter for the entire program. For the record: Jim Fallows and I learned about the Our Lens Challenge when we spoke recently in Wilmington at the invitation of the DCF.

Here are the YouTube videos. (Fair warning: You’ll see references to our book, Our Towns, in a few of the videos.)

Video 1, Our Lens Intro: An introduction to “identify an issue in your community or highlight a bright spot that you want to showcase”

Video 2, Opportunity Discovery: How to be inspired!

Video 3, How to Learn More about Anything: A guide for using interviews and observation to become a master of the issue and help plan how to convey the message in the photo

Video 4, Finding Your Story: An encouragement to share the positive story and spirit of Delaware

Video 5, Photovoice: an overview of how to highlight your message and show your voice through a photo

Video 6, Photo Basics: A walk through a series of photos, pointing out the elements of a photo and what they convey—e.g., how to create a “power pose” of subjects by shooting upward, or how to use lighting or focus to highlight a person or object

Video 7, Caption and Reflection: Writing a title, a caption, and a personal reflection on the story you’re telling through the photo

Video 8, How to Submit Your Entry: The nuts and bolts

Video 9, Challenge Conclusion: Encouragement and congratulations

Jim and I were fortunate to view the winning photos and to meet the young winning photographers and some of the organizers of the Challenge. In an email with the infectiously enthusiastic executive director of Dual School, Zack Jones, whom I met in Wilmington, he reflected on his experience with the Our Lens Challenge.

The power of something like the Our Lens Challenge is to tap into (the young people’s) wisdom and invite their voices to contribute to the broader discussion. It also invites young people to see the places they live in a more positive way. It's a reflective experience to explore your town and think deeply about how you will represent it to an outside observer.

Here are the winning photographs, with descriptions from the student photographers (identified by school and first name) of what they want their images to convey:

Lainey, Ursuline Academy, Expected Graduation: 2021

Title: 7th Street. Reflection: This photo portrays the sense of community and family that thrives in a tiny cement skate park on 7th street. When someone fell, they were picked up. There were high fives and hugs. The sense of community I felt as an outsider was so powerful. People from all over the city, no matter what age or background come together to form a family. All they know are each other’s names. How much money they make or what sex or race they are, it doesn’t matter. In this skate park, they are who they are and all are welcomed.

Deyon, Howard High School of Technology, Expected Graduation: 2022

Title: Opportunity. Reflection: This is a photo of the Hercules plaza/building. This place is full of a lot of job opportunities that are age friendly. Many people that are employed here are happy with the work they do and the amount of time they spent working here and would recommend other people to work here.

Clare, Archmere Academy, Expected Graduation: 2023

Title: The Roots of Wilmington from Atop the Brandywine. Reflection: This photo captures an overlooking view from a popular point in Brandywine Creek State Park. It not only showcases the widespread natural beauty surrounding Wilmington, but also depicts many of the unique factors of our town. The central, robust tree represents the strength and connection of our community and is a proud reminder of the origins we share. The empty bench is reminiscent of the vast wealth of opportunities awaiting both young and old, while the departing car symbolizes the role our community serves in launching ideas, movements, and change into all corners of the world.

Zoe, Ursuline Academy, Expected Graduation: 2022

Title: New & Used. Reflection: This picture was taken at a bookstore in my hometown called Hockessin Book Shelf. This small but trusty shop could be seen as a representation of my town. With enthusiastic workers that are willing to help you with any questions you might have, the care that they show reflects the passion that my town has. My town has the best of both worlds with both a used and new feel. The small shops similar to this one, you can’t quite replicate this town anywhere else.

Aeryon, Brandywine High School, Expected Graduation: 2021

Title: The Flower that Grew Through Concrete. Reflection: This flower growing through concrete symbolizes how we are capable of pushing through the obstacles and hardships of our lives. Here in Wilmington, it is so easy (especially for our youth) to be detained by those around us and distracted from achieving our dreams. Stay focused and give 110% in everything you do! Hard work and keeping your end goal in mind will allow you to blossom into a successful person from a rough city. A flower that grew through concrete.

Andrés, Salesianum High School, Expected Graduation: 2020

Title: WHY - Salesianum School, My Friends, Our Service. Reflection: Why? Seeing these words inspired me and my friends and allowed us to reflect on the true reason we were there that day: to walk to our newest service opportunity. Thus, as ambiguous as the question “Why?” may seem, our answer is to help others and be there for our fellow community members. With our school and the rest of Wilmington in the background, the numerous aspects of this image represent an intersection of my school life and the culture, the friendship, the empathy, and the collaboration that is present all across Wilmington. The commitment of my classmates to serving those in need—and now this symbol that reminds me of our collective work—that is what makes my community special.

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Along the way of our reporting for American Futures and Our Towns, I ran into the stories of some remarkable women—living and dead. Eliza Tibbets, who planted the first navel oranges in California; Isabella Greenway, who helped shape the entire copper-mining town of Ajo, Arizona, went on to found an airline company and the iconic Arizona Inn, and became the first woman representing Arizona in Congress; Jerrie Mock, a housewife from Columbus, Ohio,  who chased the dream of Amelia Earhart to become the first woman pilot to circumnavigate the globe on her own; the Women of the Commons in Eastport, Maine, who are a big part of rewriting the civic, cultural, and commercial story of Eastport, Maine; and Tracy Taft, an educator and organizer who followed Isabella Greenway to Ajo, Arizona, to drive its change from a failing former-mining town to a thriving community based on the arts.

Recently, I hit the motherlode, where well over 200 women from rural America met in Greenville, South Carolina for a gathering of the Rural Assembly, a coalition of nationwide organizations that advocates for rural communities. This one was the first ever Rural Women’s Summit. (Okay, I counted on one hand the number of men who were there, too.) They met to talk about civic life, incarceration, health, water, education, poverty, faith, relationships, conservation, family, entrepreneurship, all in the context of women living in rural America. They framed their comments from their experiences as women in the military, as organizers of movements, as filmmakers, journalists, artists, nurses, lawyers, civic leaders, mothers, convicts, politicians, faith leaders, actors, and more.

“The diversity of voices and experiences in the room was meaningful and telling,” Whitney Kimball Coe, of the Center for Rural Strategies, told me after the conference, via email. “It pushed back on stereotypes of a monolithic rural America.”

My own rural roots dwindled about a century ago, after my family had immigrated from Bohemia and Moravia, in the part of the Austro-Hungarian empire that later became Czechoslovakia, to the Midwest. Most of my relatives had lived in rural areas in Europe. My cousins and I of the American-born generation chanted that our forebears were butchers, bakers, and candy makers. My great-grandfather, who lived and died in the dozen-house village of Mlyny (mills in Czech) was the chief gardener for trees in Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s country estate, Konopiste.

I went to see his trees, maybe some had been saplings in his time, about 20 years ago, and then found my way to his village, where an older woman told me the story she heard growing up of the two young boys from Mlyny who went to America to seek a new life. One of those boys was my grandfather.

Mostly from photographs, I remember standing in the fields of tall corn in my great grandmother’s family farm in rural Minnesota. And as clear as it was yesterday, I remember the backyard garden in the West Side neighborhood of Chicago, where my grandparents ultimately moved, and where my grandfather (the baker) grew sunflowers that were twice my height. My rural connections are twice-removed compared with those of my friends from the small Ohio town where I grew up, who actually lived on farms. But I will defend some deep bloodline sense I feel when I see and listen to the stories of rural life in America today. Those are the feelings I took with me to the meeting of rural women.                                   

I gleaned a few principles about the lives of rural women that I hadn’t appreciated before.

The first is how aggravations from a single issue can quickly cascade into a series of complications that make problems worsen toward intractable.

Let’s take water, for example. Martin County, Kentucky, in the coal country of Appalachia is, as one woman described it, a poster child for water crisis. We have all been enlightened by the stories of Flint, Michigan, which would not be public without the women on the front lines there, by the way. The  broken infrastructure of water protection and handling in Martin County—cleanliness, safety, delivery, affordability, sewage—in Appalachian coal country is another piece of the troubled water story around the U.S.

This story of water there is intimate to the lived experience of the women who tell it and those who report it. By and large, it is the women who open the taps for water they use to cook, to do the laundry, to bathe the children, to drink. If the faucets deliver, which is not a given, the water often runs brown, sulfury, and smelly.

Reporting from those who live or spend time in Kentucky, be that in newsletters or rural press, adds a nuance of understanding that delivers insistent stories of a contaminated water supply, leaky and crumbling pipes, wastewater pipe shortages, industrial leaks and spills, a declining tax base from mine closures, rising water costs, and all the humanly compelling drama that ensues.  

Then the cascade begins. The women bathe the babies, who then develop rashes. The women drive them long distances to see doctors, which is costly and time-consuming. Researching medical counsel or the alternatives of telemedicine often demand broadband connections, which are scarce, spotty, or thin in poor, rural America. Navigating coverage of telehealth from insurance companies is, as you’d imagine, complicated. And of course, all these steps require technology, transportation, and bill-paying, not to mention the wherewithal to accomplish them.

The problem of rural water into and out of rural homes is a speck in the universe of the bigger forcefield of water, which includes big agriculture, mining extractions, chemical runoffs, big industry, lobbyists, federal regulators, courts, big insurance. Crises like Flint's notwithstanding, those of us who live in non-rural America usually take our water supplies for granted—or we at least trust that if something goes wrong, it will soon be fixed. But that is not necessarily the case in rural America.

It seemed clear that the case of bad water was not a one-off but rather an example of a pattern. I heard about other issues where one event cascaded into a flurry of others; violence on Indian reservations and the incarceration of women, especially mothers, were two of the worst.  

The second thing I learned at this meeting of rural women is the particular way they address their problems and design solutions. It will not surprise you if I say that rural women approach solutions and take action with a driving practicality. Isn’t that how pioneer women and immigrant women and farming women survived?

It may surprise you (it did me) that the rural women wrapped this practicality with sentiments that you might link with being too soft, weak, or self-defeating (read: emotional, vulnerable, caring). And that they sought solutions in the places that you might consider unimportant or even a throwback to an earlier pre-feminist era (read: the kitchen, the living rooms).  

But on the contrary, I heard women suggest that these “women’s ways” (my words), when they  emerge comfortably and naturally, are powerful tools to make actions effective and arguments accessible to more people. The message I heard: Do not shy from showing vulnerability, caring, or emotion. Do not apologize for it. Use it. Go into the places that are your comfort zones for work that is uncomfortable and requires you to be brave.

Here are a few specific examples for taking action:

Run for office: VoteRunLead runs training programs and online tools to encourage women to run for office, and to help them win. A starting point is planting the idea, #runasyouare, for those who may think they’re not up to it and are reluctant to jump in. According to Erin Vilardi, VoteRunLead president, “There are over 1,000 women sitting in elected office through our program. We have rates over 50 percent for first-time candidates winning their races,” adding, “One in five of our alumni are from rural communities.”

Practice radical hospitality: People’s Suppers and communal dinners are opportunities for public discourse about fraught issues, like LGBTQ issues, addictions, and arrival of refugees. Sometimes, faith leaders or places of worship step in to bridge gaps. Jennifer Bailey, an ordained itinerant elder at the African Methodist Episcopal Church and director of the Faith Matters Network, said, “Women can turn a box of spaghetti into a feast.”

Create safe spaces: Basketball courts on church grounds, daycare centers, quilting clubs in living rooms, shelters, gardens, girls’ night out. Look for activities that build familiarity and trust, and are just nice as a vehicle for discussions, ideas, and actions.

Take healthy steps at the source: get rid of deep fryers in hospital cafeterias; provide applications to SNAP and other food programs at food pantries; change the menus in school cafeterias. These are easy wins.

Tell stories: Use different frames to tell the big stories, in local media or as freelancers or in entrepreneurial journalistic start-ups. These give (new) voice to issues. There were a number of examples of reporting at the source, like the Daily Yonder, High Country News, Southerly, and 100 Days in Appalachia.

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As we’ve traveled around the country with our American Futures and Our Towns projects since 2013, my husband, Jim, and I have evolved from being skeptics to evangelists about the impact of public arts on communities. We have seen how towns’ self-image, their presentation to visitors, their marking of history or current experience, their civic engagement and quality of everyday life and interactions of residents can all be changed by the public arts.

The array of art is created by everyone from professional artists to young children, bringing a rich collection of perspectives and making for opportunity for all to participate. Judgment seems to be more forgiving of arts that are public; sometimes the process of creation brings more value than the product.

It may be daunting for people to start public-arts projects: Who gets to decide? Is it worthy? Will it be expensive? And so on. But we have run across some that are imagined and executed in a very simple way. Here is one unusual example that surely qualifies as a Big Little Idea that any town could try and that has delivered a big payoff.

In 2011, Israel Centeno was living in Pittsburgh, in the neighborhood called the Mexican War Streets. It is a proud, eclectic neighborhood on the near north side of town, walking distance to a few of Pittsburgh’s bridges and the stadium, a park, and the riverfront, old warehouses in transition, and much more. Interesting people live in the neighborhood: young families who decorate their rowhouses at Halloween, creative types of all sorts, longtime residents, all of whom feel attached to their community.

In the middle of this is a small street called Sampsonia Way, which I would describe as an American version of a Beijing hutong. Attached houses, a dusty street that is not quite paved, and an intimacy among neighbors. Centeno lived with his wife and two daughters in a renovated rowhouse there.

Centeno is a writer and poet who needed asylum from his native Venezuela. He was offered sanctuary to live and work there for a few years by City of Asylum, an organization founded and originally funded by a Pittsburgh couple, Henry Reese and Diane Samuels, an entrepreneur and an artist.

City of Asylum is celebrating its 15th anniversary of offering asylum to exiled artists from countries like Iran, Burma, China, El Salvador, Iraq, and more. In exchange, the artists give back to Pittsburgh in the form of some kind of artistic work and public presentation. Several of the artists who have passed through City of Asylum are returning for that celebration. They will surely admire all the expansions that have happened since we first visited in 2014. There is a new park, called the Alphabet Reading Garden, also a newly renovated Masonic Temple building turned into a literary center for readings, a bookstore, a coffee shop, and performance spaces. Crowds for the artists’ public presentations have continued to grow.

Israel Centeno’s Big Little Idea is called the River of Words. Here’s how it worked:

Centeno chose 100 words, which to him held some special meaning for Pittsburgh and his evolving experience there. Among them were all kinds of words: talent, thought, baseball, temperance, equation, horizon, ginger, nostalgia, fear, plenilunio, God. Then, the residents of the neighborhood were invited to adopt and host a “word in residence” and to display it for the public. The reaction was astonishing. People went crazy, in a good way, claiming their words. “Vortex! I must have vortex!” cried one.

A graphic artist, Carolina Arnal, and Gisela Romero, a graphic designer and visual artist, fabricated and affixed the words, from bold to lightly conspicuous, sometimes on a garden gate, by the front door, near a window.

What began as a temporary installation in 2014 remains, as residents refused to give up their words. Henry Reese told me that only a few are gone, and those because the owners moved and took the words with them. When Jim and I returned early on after the installations, we prowled around looking for the words, wondering each time we found one about the backstory of the word and the owners.

Now there is a map to follow for some of the words, which reminded me of the Map of the Stars near Hollywood.

Hosts of the words tell stories about the installations, and how curious neighbors came out of their houses to watch, and ended up asking for their own words to adopt. They talk about how the words help create an identity for the community and to share that story with anyone who happens by. Sometimes, I daresay, they puzzle, which makes people stop, think, and discuss.

We all know the power of words. They can please or hurt; indict or free; validate, disarm, declare, symbolize, obfuscate, or clarify. Sometimes they can’t be translated, so we borrow them from one language into another. Sometimes they are used incorrectly, out of ignorance or for effect. They can stand for much more than their size alone, especially single words, or short phrases. Their meanings can grow and shrink over time. Sometimes we make them up when we need them for inventions or marketing. Some catch on. Others go out of fashion or disappear. Their pronunciations change; their versions change within their grammars or social mores. Alphabets change. What have I overlooked?

River of Words may do all these things. It also marks a moment in time in the history of this community on the North Side of Pittsburgh, which is something the residents there seem to appreciate and acknowledge. That is a lot to say about 100 words.

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During our travels visiting towns and cities across the country for American Futures and now Our Towns, Jim Fallows (my husband) and I have encountered story after story of short, sweet initiatives that we have begun referring to, fondly, as Big Little Ideas. The ideas usually started from sparks somewhere in the community—maybe from a teacher or newspaper reporter, a librarian or rec-center staffer, a young entrepreneur, a city worker, a lawyer, an artist, or a neighborhood parent. Everyman or Everywoman.

The ideas might be for a way to seize an opportunity, solve a problem, suggest a collaboration, or enhance a service. They are simple: the kind of thing that once you hear about it, you’re likely to say “Of course!” or “Why didn’t I think of that?!”

The background issues these are addressing are not always grandiose, like climate change. But they have far-reaching, positive potential. They don’t require gearing up teams and processes. You can “try this at home” and be likely to replicate it much more easily than you could a lab experiment.

We would like to share these Big Little Ideas, starting here, in a series we’ll call, yup, Big Little Ideas. We hope you like them, will be inspired by them, copy them, and will send us information about the Big Little Ideas that you’ve seen as successes (or even failures) in your hometown. Please email us here: ourtowns@theatlantic.com.

In 2009, the Nashville Public Library (NPL) and Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS), inspired by then-Mayor Karl Dean, began a collaboration whereby student-ID cards double as library cards. Every student from grades 3–12 in the MNPS system automatically owns a card to the public library. Teachers do too. They call the project Limitless Libraries. (An aside: When I asked Mayor Dean about the idea, he immediately pointed out that this was a team effort, not just his. He was that kind of mayor.)

What did this idea mean? First, the compulsory student ID placed the public library on the radar of every student in Nashville—surprising new terrain for many students and their families. It also put access to the library’s (age-appropriate) holdings and programming easily into the hands of the students, flattening any bumps that lay between students and resources. Students (and teachers) can request material from the library to be delivered and returned to their school library, where they study or work every day. The collaboration also moved school libraries into a bigger, more powerful citywide system, making it easier and less expensive to purchase their own materials.

Has it worked? The NPL system has purchased more than $7 million of materials for the school system, and provided schools with borrowable technology like laptops and iPads, and even 3-D printers. It has also introduced $4 million worth of architectural changes into school libraries, modernizing them into state-of-the-art areas for reading, collaborating, and maker-spaces. The idea moved from a pilot program in 2009 to all MNPS school libraries by 2017. In the 2017–18 school year, the program served more than 90,000 students, teachers, and librarians and saved MNPS half a million dollars.

In 2015, Barack Obama’s administration launched a program that quickly got library cards to more than 1 million students in 60 communities. It was called the ConnectED Library Challenge. You can read all the details of this nationwide effort, plus a how-to guide, here.

The program has grown to more than 100 libraries and is called the Leaders Library Card Challenge, led by the Urban Libraries Council and supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. You can read about it here.

One of the beauties of this Big Little Idea is that communities can tailor their efforts to their own wants and needs. For example, in 2014 Chattanooga eliminated the library membership fee for Hamilton County residents, making up the shortfall from its city budget. In Denver, the My Denver card includes students’ free use of the city’s rec centers and swimming pools. Milwaukee linked school IDs to virtual library cards, eliminating the need for physical cards for library use. Many libraries are eliminating late fees for students’ overdue books or giving them a way to work off their fines by attending programs or volunteering at the library. Staff from the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, in Ohio, visit every kindergarten in the 22-district school system to sign up kids for a child-only library card.

And for those who are looking for an even Littler Big Idea, you might take inspiration from the Arkansas teacher and school-bus driver Julie Callison, who stocks her bus with a bucket of books for kids to read during the rides to and from school.

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When it came to planning the new public library for downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the people of the city had a lot to say, from the visionary to the practical. The library should “make an important statement” and “be a place for the public to be together,” Nan La Rosee, the central operations manager of the Forsyth County Public Library, told me during a recent visit.

She went on to rattle off the wish list of specifics, from meeting spaces, an outdoor place to sit and gather, somewhere to eat, an architecturally significant building, and an art gallery to more seating areas, an atmosphere full of light and spaciousness, and on and on. About a decade earlier, the voters had passed a bond that would provide some $28 million to build the central library, so they were well invested and interested.

The people’s ideas and more have been realized on a grand scale, with spaces to suit all kinds of activities and meetings and gatherings. I peered into the 290-person auditorium during a screening of Thor: Ragnarok, from the popular Avengers series then being run at the library. I walked by the big glass windows of the 10-person conference room, where a full house of young adults, laptops open, was in animated conversation about something—maybe a class, maybe a civic issue, maybe start-up plans. La Rosee said the always discreet librarians “try not to oversee too much” and strive to strike the right balance so that the meetings have a public connection and are not simply for private profit. After all, she reminded me, “the library was built from taxpayer money.”

There are three smaller rooms with space for up to four people, one with assistive technology for the visually impaired; a sound-production room; and three more rooms tucked in a back corner of the inviting children’s space for private, supervised meetings among, for example, children, parents, and social workers. The library also has a demonstration kitchen and a computer teaching lab.

When I asked La Rosee what the public has to say now that the library has been up and running for two years, she said they report back that all these spaces in the new library contribute to the sense that this is a “hub of Winston-Salem in touch with the people” (her emphasis).

The central library of the Forsyth County Public Library is the main library for the city, but it is also a neighborhood library for a diverse population: those who live in the historic downtown homes, or in factories turned loft space, or in the subsidized housing, or the homeless. Nearly every other library I have visited in the past six years welcomes homeless people who spend their days there. Winston-Salem has addressed its homeless patrons in a creative way. The library was awarded a $150,000 multiyear grant from the state, provided by funds from the Library Services and Technology Act, for staff to learn how to help the homeless with job-readiness strategies and skills, and it hired a permanent peer-support specialist to work with homeless individuals to help them navigate through their often complex set of challenges, from housing and financial assistance to medical services and mental-health counseling.

New collaborations have happened courtesy of the new space. Wake Forest Baptist Health’s Sticht Center for Healthy Aging and Alzheimer’s Prevention, which is also a neighbor to the library, found the library a great place to reach out to new populations it could serve. It is in the second year of an ongoing series for the senior members of Winston-Salem on “aging well.” The children from the Downtown School, a nearby pre-K–eight magnet school where many parents who work downtown send them, visit the library regularly. Each elementary class visits the library monthly to learn library and research skills, or to get in-depth information for a class project. Older students come as a group for specific projects they are working on. The library is a natural, convenient, safe, and trusted place for seniors and children to try new things and to spend time. These meetings strengthen the texture and empathy of a community in the same way that YMCAs or public recreation spaces or free arts performances do; they provide the opportunity for town residents to simply be in the presence of others with whom they might not cross paths in their everyday lives.

When I first walked into the library, I wondered for a moment: Is this an art gallery, or is it a library? The answer is really both. The welcoming open plan, the accommodating wall space, the changing perspectives of the interior you see as you wander from section to section and even floor to floor are a natural invitation to enjoy the library’s permanent collection of art from Ralph Philip Hanes Jr. and many others. Hanes, who was part of a sprawling civic-minded and philanthropic family of Winston-Salem, donated works that include Andrew Wyeth’s Watering Trough. There is much more: a sculpture by Jean René Gauguin, the son of Paul Gauguin, and a very, very large metal sculpture of an open book with the word library engraved in several languages, by the Alabaman Deedee Morrison. The sculpture greets visitors on the front lawn by the main entrance.

The stewardship of the library’s art struck me as both serious and fun. As for serious, the library cleaned and restored the Hanes collection before placement in its new home. As for fun, on the afternoon that I wandered in, La Rosee was just heading out to pick up more art pieces that people had donated to the library. The way she said it, when she kindly delayed her departure to talk with me, gave me the sense that this particular kind of (pleasant) errand occurred frequently.

Another surprise is the North Carolina Room, described by La Rosee as the “crown jewel” of North Carolina historical and genealogical collections. There is a photograph collection from the region that dates back to the late 19th century; a map collection; the ever popular genealogy section; historical legal information; newspaper archives; travel, culture and folklore holdings; and on and on. You could spend days, months inside this room.

On the technology side, Winston-Salem installed more than five dozen computers for public use, two dozen more used for training new users, seniors, or those seeking to upgrade tech skills for possible new jobs; for Spanish speakers; and with technology for those with disabilities. And looking ahead to the day when more users will bring in their own laptop rather than use the ones at the library (a planning notion that other libraries have mentioned to me as well ), the library has made plenty of room for empty table workspace with plenty of charging stations.

Winston-Salem’s maker space is modest compared with those I’ve seen in many other towns, like Brownsville, Texas, and my hometown of Washington, D.C., which have lots of computer-assisted technologies like 3-D printers and laser cutters. Others have maker spaces like the one I saw in Dodge City, Kansas, which rely on donated equipment like sewing machines and basement-shop tools. The one in Winston-Salem has a modest collection of hardware, 3-D printers, and sewing machines, but La Rosee described it as more of a space for “making and doing” sessions and teaching.

If you’re interested to follow the latest research on how people use libraries, how they value their local libraries, and some of the changing trends in libraries and library use, please go to the Pew Research Center’s collection of surveys and reports. (For the record: I worked at the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project in the early 2000s.)

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Brownsville is the southernmost U.S. border town with Mexico, down at the very tip of the map of Texas. Across the Rio Grande is Matamoros. Some 20 miles to the east is the Gulf of Mexico. If you drive 60 miles to the north and west along the Old Military Highway to McAllen, you’ll see stretches of border wall, irregular in their size and design. It was very hot when we were in Brownsville last month. It reminded me of Nanjing, one of the so-called furnaces of China, where the soles of your sneakers sink into the soft tarmac of the roads.

Elon Musk has built his SpaceX site on the road from Brownsville to the coast. It is an assembly site for now, in a clearing that looks like half moonscape, half desert, with giant, surreal, bright-silvery sections of rocket being welded together. The plan is for rockets to launch from here one day. Just beyond SpaceX, the Boca Chica road fades to sandy coastal beach. It feels like the edge of the Earth.

Border Patrol agents cruise the highways and roads around Brownsville. One afternoon, as I was driving the highway north from downtown, a silent ambulance cruised by, with a Border Patrol SUV, caked with dust and dried mud, right on its tail. I realized that I didn’t have a clue of all that was really going on in Brownsville.

Some things about Brownsville are easy to see. The buildings of the downtown—many tattered now, featuring discount goods for the cross-border shopping market in Matamoros—still have great bones, as the architects say, and are waiting for their second chance. Brownsville was too poor to raze those buildings when businesses went dark, an obvious advantage now. (As we have seen elsewhere.)

A hip pizza and wine bar called Dodici opened recently in the old Fernandez building downtown. One of the owners is Trey Mendez, a lawyer who was just elected mayor in a runoff contest while we were visiting. The Market Square area is newly renovated, as part of a downtown-revival program under the mayor for the previous eight years, Tony Martinez. Brownsville has an outsize number of museums, including the Historic Brownsville Museum, which is a real gem. The Mitte Cultural District boasts “something for everyone,” with its zoo, pool, pavilions, playhouse, and much more. RJ Mitte (who played Walter White’s son in Breaking Bad) is of that Mitte family, and is carrying on the family philanthropic efforts of his grandfather. Other buildings are works in progress. More are still pipe dreams.

Of course, you cannot miss the border wall. The wall near downtown’s Gateway International Bridge has been there for about 10 years, long enough that the landscaping and vegetation along its river pathway and the Alice Wilson Hope Park on the U.S. side have grown in to looking normal.

On our first evening in Brownsville, when the heat of the day had subsided a little, Jim and I decided to walk across the International Bridge into Matamoros. How could we not? We had no chance of entering the detention centers that have become so notorious in the Rio Grande Valley and elsewhere along the border. We wanted to have at least a look at the routine daily flow north and south.

Our crossing was entirely simple and uneventful, of course, just like it is for residents of both Brownsville and Matamoros who cross the bridge daily for school, jobs, shopping, dinners out, or visiting friends and family. (Brownsville’s population is roughly 95 percent Hispanic, and many people have long-standing ties across the border. The interconnectedness of the two cities’ lives is the central theme of an acclaimed recent novel set in Brownsville: Where We Come From, by Oscar Cásares. When we were in town, then-Mayor Martinez gave us a copy of the book.) Along with a small handful of people also making the trip on foot, we deposited four quarters in the turnstile and pushed our way through to Mexico.

I looked up and down the river, assessing it with my swimmer’s eye, thinking how surprisingly narrow and benign it seemed, maybe 50 yards wide. The river was dark and muddy, not in the least inviting, even in the heat. The Rio Grande appeared to have no current. But of course we all know that surface appearances can deceive, as they most certainly did in the horrific episode when Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez of El Salvador and his 2-year-old daughter, Valeria, drowned trying to cross it not far from this spot, a few days after we were there.

Brownsville residents, who have lived all their life as part of a binational community extended on both sides of the river, have a different sense of the border from those for whom it’s an abstraction. “We don’t think of it as a border,” we heard from so many people that we stopped counting. “We think of it as a river.” I realized that it was just the way those of us who live on the border between Washington, D.C., and Virginia think of the Potomac.

Beyond these impressions of Brownsville, there are data points that are more quantifiable. This is where the public-health issues come to the forefront, and they are stark. (My thanks to The Atlantic’s Faith Hill for help collecting these data.)

Some 51 percent of the adult population in the area are obese; an additional 34 percent are overweight.

Of children 8 to 17 years old, 54 percent are obese, compared with about 33 percent nationally. Joseph McCormick, until just recently the dean of the Brownsville campus of the UTHealth School of Public Health, wrote in an email: “These children have higher BMI, higher waist to hip ratios, higher systolic and diastolic blood pressures, higher triglycerides and LDL (bad cholesterol), lower HDL (good cholesterol); They had higher insulin resistance (a precursor to diabetes), and elevated liver enzymes suggestive of fatty liver disease, a very common problem in our population in adults.”

Some 27 percent of adults have diabetes, about three times the national level. About one-third of those with diabetes didn’t know they had it before being tested.

Only 42 percent of Brownsville’s population have some kind of health-care insurance.

For more positive comparative news, life expectancy in Cameron County, which includes Brownsville, is about 80 years, four years longer than the national average.

And Texas has one of the country’s lowest rates of death from opioid-involved drug overdoses: 5.1 for every 100,000 people, compared with the national average of 14.6.

Brownsville is a poor town; nearly 31 percent of the residents live in poverty, 38 percent of children. The median income is $35,000. Some 87 percent of schoolchildren in Cameron County qualify for free or reduced lunch.

I had lunch one day to talk about these statistics with Rose Zavaletta Gowen, a medical doctor who grew up in Brownsville, trained in Dallas, and returned to practice medicine. She soon turned to public-health advocacy and added a new role as an elected city commissioner. Gowen framed her thinking, advocacy, passion, and action plans for her hometown this way: “We traditionally think we need economic development and education, and we’ll get to health later or afterwards.” She added, “But later may be too late, and putting it off hinders progress in economic development and education as well.”

Gowen is part of Brownsville’s Community Advisory Board (CAB), a network of more than 200 Brownsville residents and individuals from health-care, education, business, and community groups, and the UTHealth campus, which, with its newly appointed dean of the campus, Belinda Reininger, has been key in the founding and support of CAB. All together, they are pushing toward building a healthier population and lifestyle, in a very Brownsville-specific way.

Every community we have visited for our American Futures project and our subsequent book, Our Towns, has focused on the “local” as its guide and frame for plans and actions. In Brownsville, that eye on local seemed to us as compelling and powerful as in any other community we have seen, and maybe even more so. Sometimes “local” means a focus on physical assets, or geography, or demographics, or industry. In Brownsville, as we listened to citizens talk, “local” seemed to be mainly about culture.

The culture of Brownsville was the backdrop to their master plan for health and wellness—and many other town issues. “We are fighters. We stand by our family. We are proud. We may be poor, but we do not think of ourselves as just poor. We think of ourselves as blessed to have our families, customs, and region surrounding us.” And Gowen added in talking about outsiders’ impressions of Brownsville, “You don’t hear that on the news.”

Those traits translated into action. Brownsville is not looking or waiting for top-down solutions and proclamations. Members of its community decided to: make local-government regulations that support their goals. Get smart about seeking funding, from the government, foundations, and nonprofits. Not let rebuffs from big funding stop them; take it step by step; and find corners to improve. Educate the public and brand the message “Health and wellness.” Become a model for success.

This kind of positive, panoramic, inclusive approach is one we’ve seen in niche initiatives and big plans in many of the towns we’ve visited. Libraries in Bend, Oregon. Arts and entrepreneurship in Fresno. Education in Greenville. Downtowns and Main Streets everywhere. Workforce training and new industry in Mississippi’s Golden Triangle. The entire town of Eastport, Maine.

Through its many initiatives, the Brownsville Wellness Coalition is all about healthy food and healthy bodies.The Community Gardens program teaches gardening classes and distributes free transplants and compost. Five gardens hold nearly 200 beds.

People can buy produce from the weekly farmers’ market with cash or with vouchers from federally subsidized programs such as SNAP, WIC, and the Farm Fresh Voucher program, especially important in this low-income town. Plans are under way through a coalition of funders to renovate an old town cannery, the Gutierrez Warehouse, into a permanent home for the farmers’ market. When finished, the Quonset hut plans also call for accommodating a food bank and a “kitchen incubator” with a commercial kitchen for small food businesses. And for those who can’t get to the farmers’ market, the Fresco Mobile Market food trucks may come to them.

The Happy Kitchen/La Cocina Alegre holds classes on nutrition, food preparation, and healthy eating.

And for the bodies, the Wellness Coalition sponsors a walking-group program, the Walking Club, with motivational support and progress tracking.

An annual challenge program organized by the city and the UTHealth School of Public Health, and drawing help from local gyms, nutritionists, trainers, and other experts, encourages not only weight loss, but also sustainable lifestyle changes toward better health. Nearly 7,500 people participated in the three-month program this year.

The monthly CycloBia closes some Brownsville streets to cars and opens them to the 10,000 participating residents to walk, bike, skateboard, skate, and run.

And for the timid, who may be the most reluctant to begin, the UTHealth School of Public Health has prepared online resources, Tu Salud Si Cuenta, where people can tiptoe into exercise and healthy eating and weight loss privately and solo. I found the stories poignant, and brave, and ended up rooting for them.

Brownsville is also part of a multiuse-trail program (bikes! paddling! hiking!) throughout the lower Rio Grande Valley that will link several towns, beaches, preserves, waterways, and cultural sites over 400-plus miles, incorporating as well a dream of tourism potential.

Is any of this working? According to McCormick, the rates of obesity and diabetes have dropped about 3 to 4 percent in Brownsville in about the past five years.

Trails through downtown Brownsville already give lots of folks options for daily commutes to school or work or, as in our case, a visit to 1848 BBQ, a slow-cook barbecue named for the year Brownsville was founded. As one who spent about five years living in Austin and got my graduate degree from the University of Texas, I feel that my Texas bona fides and palate entitle me to shout out Abraham Avila, the chef of 1848. Yeah, lots of calories, but sitting right on a hike-and-bike trail, you can worry about working it off later. It’s worth it.

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