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Perspectives: A model for the year ahead

The Rock Island room at the Door County Community Foundation was full of people waiting for the arrival of Gov. Tony Evers last Thursday, Dec. 16. Evers was there making a pit stop in Door County to announce a $3.5 million workforce-development grant awarded to United Way of Door County to support child care and housing initiatives. 

A younger version of me would have seen a story about the governor. I would have elbowed in to ask him questions, get some quotes to put high in the story. I probably would have shoehorned in some topics that had no business being there. 

But the governor’s office wasn’t the story. 

After the press conference and the official words, eight women gathered at the front of the room for a photo: Christina Studebaker and Amy Kohnle of United Way of Door County, Cindy Trinkner-Peot and Jennifer Thompson of the Northern Door Children’s Center, Bridget Starr and Alexis Fuller of the Door Community Child Development Center, Mariah Goode of the Door County Housing Partnership, and Paula Anschutz from … well, she’s just Paula – a young woman who’s working her tail off to create employee housing in Sister Bay. 

Two years ago, in the days before the pandemic, when United Way launched a series of community conversations about the county’s child care crisis, these women barely knew each other. The pandemic could have stopped the United Way project dead in its tracks, but it only accelerated it – in virtual form. 

Alexis Fuller could have given up when the YMCA got out of the child care business and closed the Barker Center where she had worked, but she doubled down, resurrecting what others had deemed a failing business model. 

For 20 years, Mariah Goode has plugged along on the housing front, searching for a solution to make living here sustainable for workers and families, even as it became more difficult by the day. 

And Paula Anschutz – who, last spring, knew nothing about zoning, grant writing or construction, let alone moving buildings – is now on the verge of creating one of the first true affordable-housing projects of scale in northern Door County in years. 

There they stood, neighbors and friends, working across organizations, plowing through roadblock after roadblock through years, coming together to bring $3.5 million to our community to address three issues that dominated the conversation during the year that was. 

After the governor spoke, I talked to each of them, and each quickly pointed me to the work of someone else. 

In a year when so many of us couldn’t agree that the earth is round and the sky is up, when politicians and organizations squabble over every morsel of credit and search harder for excuses than solutions, I paused Thursday to soak in what I was witnessing. 

Here were eight people coming together simply to do something good, and not caring who got the credit – only that the community got what it needed. 

It’s a great final image for 2021, and a better model for 2022. 

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