This summer, members of our community came together for a three-part discussion of Emily Walton’s Homesick: Race & Exclusion in Rural New Hampshire. We started with the research and stories in the book, talked honestly about race, identity, exclusion, and belonging in rural communities, and ended our final conversation with perhaps the most important question:
What do we do from here?
The conversation generated no shortage of ideas.
Participants talked about finding more ways to welcome newcomers intentionally, including welcoming committees that help people build relationships and understand how to plug into their community.
We talked about the power of storytelling and the need to make more room for non-dominant voices, stories, identities, and cultures into community life and narratives.
We talked about the power of storytelling and the importance of making more room for non-dominant voices, identities, cultures, and experiences in the stories we tell about our communities and the way we shape community life.
There was also discussion about the role civic leaders can play in fostering a broader sense of inclusion and belonging, including using public resources to create opportunities for people from different backgrounds to come together around shared interests, experiences, and goals.
And beneath many of the ideas was something even simpler: connection.
How do we make it easier for someone who is new to the Monadnock Region to meet people? How do we help longtime residents build relationships with neighbors whose experiences may be different from their own? How do we make the many opportunities already happening across our region easier to find and join?
Homesick reminded us that exclusion in rural communities doesn’t always look dramatic or intentional. Sometimes it looks like never being invited, never seeing yourself represented, not knowing where to go, or simply feeling like everyone else already belongs to something you don’t.
Creating a more welcoming community requires more than saying, “Everyone is welcome here.”
It requires building the relationships, traditions, resources, and pathways that allow people to actually experience that welcome.
Our book club may be finished, but the conversation isn’t. In many ways, we’re just getting started.
Thank you to everyone who read, listened, shared a story, challenged an assumption, asked a difficult question, or offered an idea. Now comes the interesting part: figuring out what we can build together.