Sometimes, community building can feel overwhelming. Observing our communities, the dire needs alongside the diversity of belief systems and ideologies, it really can feel like there’s no way to find a seat at the table for everybody. Yet, a key tenet of the work we...
Hub Happenings in the Milan / Berlin / Gorham Region
Previous Events
Woven Together: Working with The Milan Village School
The Milan Village School is a community hub in its own right and the school as a whole works incredibly hard to be active contributors to the community. The sixth grade class, in particular, complete Community Service Learning Projects that they work on throughout the...
Arcana: Art Show at The Three Sisters
What began as a passion project among friends became a true example of creating a shared experience across a wide variety of community members. Local metalsmith Laura Jamison and sometimes artist, mostly community builder Mandy Bernd collaborated on an interactive...
Berlin Porchfest 2023
This event draws from the collective efforts and contributions of many to provide an experience for all. Berlin’s 2nd annual PorchFest was held on September 22, 2023. From 4 in the afternoon until 10 in the evening....
Trunk or Treat, Milan and Berlin 2023
Mandy participated in two Trunk or Treating events during the Halloween Season. Berlin Elementary School’s PTO hosted their Trunk or Treat at the Heritage Park in Berlin on October 24th. Milan’s Recreation Department hosted another at Milan Village School on October...
The Hoping Machine
The Father of Folk, Woody Guthrie, says “…about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine.”
It’s no accident that hope followed on the heels of calamity and terror when Pandora opened that infamous box. Hope is what gets us up in the morning and keeps us chugging along. Often lumped together with the far-off intangibility of dreams, hope speaks to the immediacy of our days. “I hope this guy doesn’t cut me off…I hope they bring back the McRib…I hope I can make it through another day.” Guthrie speaks true in saying that humans are hoping machines, tireless in our onward march through life, hoping moment by moment.
Though hope saturates our days, it is a function that is largely outside of our control. In our work with the Community Builders Hub, we place an emphasis on the power of our communities. Our hopes are tied to the ability of others to see their own worth, creativity, and desires move from the intangible and into reality. The single biggest reward of the work that we do is in witnessing the real time evolution of hope into dreams, dreams into desire, and desire into action.
Berlin’s PorchFest is a particularly fine example of hope made manifest through the power of the community. An hours long concert that winds through the old Irish Acre’s neighborhood, PorchFest relies solely on the power of community participation. To list out the roles and functions that community members gave to make this event possible would take reams of paper: close to a hundred community members put their DNA on this event. Even more came to enjoy the day, with crowd sizes numbering in the hundreds. When we look closely and peel back the layers of PorchFest, we can see that the bedrock foundation of this community outpouring is borne of hope: We hope that you feel welcomed and that you know you belong here; that you see your worth simply by being present with us. We hope that our communities begin to see the abundance that they contain. We hope you had a good time and we hope to see you again.
It’s a simple thing, really. But when hope can be recognized and harnessed, it can lead to truly amazing things. As our old friend Woody says, “Word is the music and people are the song, tomorrow’s chances feel like a singing god.” In its final evolution, hope is an invitation: come and add your harmony to the chorus of fellow hoping machines and hear the richness of the song.
