The spark behind this

I don't run 395local so much as tend it. Think of me as one of the people keeping a small fire going — alongside a crew of community volunteers — so a town has somewhere to gather. The fire was never mine. It belongs to the place.

I learned that a long time ago in Halifax, where I built bethechange.ca: an activist community calendar and a Sunday-night email that swept scattered happenings into one place. It sent people into the streets and the church basements — Iraq-war protests, evenings with the Raging Grannies, a night listening to David Suzuki. Groups that usually kept to their own corners suddenly shared a calendar, and more people showed up. Just gathering the information turned out to be a quiet kind of power.

Those were busy years. I volunteered with Clean Nova Scotia and joined the Canadian Youth Summit Team for the 2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg; at one UN climate session I was detained for making a sign by hand, right there in the hall — Clean Power for Poor Women. I also ran a juice stand called Solar Juice — an eight-foot bike trailer with a tabletop and a solar panel bolted on the back, making beet, carrot and ginger juice entirely off the sun. Clean energy, to me, was never the carbon math. It was people — and who gets left out.

That itch to make things understood turned into my work. I started Switch Fuel, pressing home-heating pellets from biomass — switchgrass among it — and found I was far better at explaining the idea than making it. So I built a company around the explaining: Switch Video, turning tangled ideas into short, clear stories for everyone from tiny startups to Microsoft and the UN. We grew to twenty-seven people, and in 2011 we landed at #16 on the PROFIT HOT 50, Canada's ranking of its fastest-growing young companies. The lesson stuck: good work dies in the dark. People can't show up for what they can't find.

I came to the U.S. in 2011, full of hope — in community, and in what this country might be. The years since have taught me something harder: how easily people live right next to each other and never quite meet. I don't say it bitterly. It only made one thing plain — belonging doesn't arrive on its own. Somebody has to gather it.

These days my wife Kate, our four kids and I do our gathering from a converted school bus — one that runs, fittingly, on four thousand watts of solar. I've been living off the sun a long time now. At the moment we're parked on Vancouver Island, and I run 395local from the road: a small piece of the everyday cooperation between the U.S. and Canada that used to be more of a thing than it is lately. The calendar doesn't mind where the bus is parked.

The good stuff out here is endless — the live music, the trail days, the fundraisers, the library storytimes — it's only ever scattered. 395local is me reaching back to that old Halifax work and carrying it forward: pulling the flood of good things into one place, where a town can see itself, get excited about itself, and find what it has in common.

A little light, pulled together, into something like hope.