Three of the people we work with on a regular basis are building houses, “back home,” in the countries they come from. They are here in the United States to build a future for themselves, and their families. The jobs they work here are pretty low paying, but that is more than they would ever make staying in Central, or South America.
While here they live a better than average life style. Most of that can be attributed to a deep sense of community. It’s the same as when we travel to other countries. Every one we meet from ”back home” becomes a friend.
There is a lot of sharing, and caring in a stand offish kind of way. It’s a complicated culture that is both competitive, and collaborative at the same time. The one common theme is that these people traveled a long way to make a better life for themselves. It’s a powerful motivation.
In this next year we will be working toward building our community in a variety of ways. The first, and foremost, is helping people with the business that they have. Our second goal for this year is to consolidate more resources.
It seems to me that many people are spread out duplicating tasks. With some of the other web sites we set up this year our hope is that we can direct more interest to our community businesses. We’ll start with home services, and grow into the management of other business interests over the year.
We would like to develop affordable housing. This seems, here in Seattle, to be extremely hard to come by. In order to do that we would need to develop more financial services. We have a pronounced need for bookkeeping, and accounting. We need people who are interested in, and have the ability to, manage projects and people.
Like building a house we would like to lay the foundation for others future goals.
