On 'Going Far by Going Together'

I’ll admit it: I’m a sucker for proverbs and mottos and adages and mantras. Good ones distill big things down to small, bite-sized quotable nuggets of wisdom.

That’s one of the reasons I opened “Going Far by Going Together,” a recent piece I wrote on the power of partnerships with a mantra from Brian Treece that I really like: “We are far stronger when we work together. Yes, we can do challenging things on our own, but we can do the really tough things together.”

Which immediately reminded me of: If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together; and, many hands make light work.

Treece is president and CEO of the Findlay-Hancock County Community Foundation, headquartered in northwest Ohio. It is one of the organizations I featured in that article. Others include the Arras Foundation, a health legacy foundation headquartered in Lancaster, South Carolina; the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque, a community foundation with a growing regional footprint; and PA Humanities, Pennsylvania’s statewide humanities council that, in impressive ways, is much more than what you might think of as a traditional humanities council.

What do they all have in common?

They’re partnering with Community Heart & Soul, the Vermont-based nonprofit that promotes its namesake resident-driven community development model, with a growing national footprint that includes over a hundred towns to date, which I’ve written about often, including in this space and elsewhere.

Why does this matter, and why am I sharing it here?

As I wrote in a previous post to my Substack:

“And there is, of course, a growing concern for the lack of civic engagement today, and the impact of ‘civic deserts’. And as the nation grapples with a loneliness epidemic, one argument is to improve our mental and physical health by restoring our civic health because they are linked.”

When people say, “All I hear is that we are divided, and can’t get along,” and ask, “What can we do about that?”, one of my answers is to lift up examples of when/where/how people are working together.

In the case of Community Heart & Soul and these foundations and councils among others, they’re able to do the tough stuff (like, bring residents together around common goals to improve their towns) and make the lifts lighter by going farther, together.