Charity [No Name Given] and Jacalyn Holmes

[00:05] CHARITY: My name is charity. I am 35 years old. The date is May 23, 2022. I am in the StoryCorps virtual recording booth, and I'm here with Jacalyn my one small step conversation partner.

[00:26] JACALYN: My name is Jacalyn I am 75 years old until two weeks from now, when I'll be 76. The date's May 23, 2022. I am in the story course virtual recording booth, and I'm here with charity, my one small step conversation partner. Hello.

[00:50] CHARITY: Hi, Jacalyn Why did you want to do this interview today? Jacalyn

[00:59] JACALYN: Because I tried before to be part of this. I love to meet people. I really enjoy the process of getting to know people, and I think that it's part of our future to be able to reach out beyond the normal confines of the people, you know? I think we must learn to be part of the larger global community. Otherwise, how do we address all the issues of climate warming and everything else?

[01:44] CHARITY: Yeah. Well, the reason I wanted to do this interview today is because listening to people tell their personal stories has been very formative for me as I've gotten older. When I was young, I had a very low view of listening to people's personal experiences. I rejected the validity of that a lot when I was. When I was young. But my experience just becoming more of an adult, I guess, has made it very. Listening to those stories, even when I didn't opt in, ended up really changing my life a lot. And so when I have the opportunity to do that, I want to do it, and I want to encourage other people in my personal community and my faith community to embrace that opportunity as well. Now, Jacalyn I'm going to read your bio. All right, so this is what you wrote for me to get to know you. I'm a fourth generation us political refugee family. I knew my great grandparents, still connected to homesteaded land. First in family to graduate college. Oldest of five children. Married 52 years with three children, six grandchildren, all who live in same metro area. Retired probation officer. Founder of Habitat for Humanity Fresno. Current president of a very active nonprofit neighborhood garden and community center. No employees. At odds with local institutional leaders. Tired of fighting, hopeful.

[03:46] JACALYN: Let me see if I can find charities here. All I'm seeing the chat.

[03:53] CHARITY: Yeah.

[03:55] JACALYN: I was born in Fresno and love it. I'm a criminal prosecutor and the mother of two girls. Married for nearly 14 years. Christian, recovering Republican. My parents survived a plane crash when I was 17. Like the plane, their marriage is a wreck. I have a knee jerk aversion to anything trendy. I'm fiercely loyal, but struggle to make friends. I hold grudges that I'm working on that. I've been told I'm more head than heart, but I'm working on that, too. I've been told that I am more heart than head, and they're both. So both ways of being with people matter.

[04:46] CHARITY: Yeah.

[04:49] JACALYN: So you were a. You are a prosecutor?

[04:53] CHARITY: I am.

[04:54] JACALYN: You are. I was a. At some point in my probation career, a superior court officer for the probation department, for pre. For the priest. The. What was that? I'm getting old. The sentencing reports. Yeah, the sentencing reports.

[05:15] CHARITY: I would love to hear a little bit about your career, because being a woman in probation, I imagine, was not very common when you started.

[05:25] JACALYN: It was not very common. My dad was a peace officer. He started some different programs in Tulare county, and I was inspired by that because he'd bring those guys home at night, and I'd sit in the hall and listen while they talked about all the stuff that they'd done. So I majored in criminology and became a probation officer for about ten years full time. And I was not hired for a supervisor position. And I was told by several people that if the aggressiveness that you show had been in a man's body, you would have been hired for that position. But I actually never found it to be a disability. I generally felt that people who underestimated me lost out.

[06:29] CHARITY: Yeah. Yeah. I would also love to know more about you. You mentioned your father was a peace officer, and in your bio, you talked about your refugee background and having a deep knowledge of a lot of generations in your family. I would just love to hear about your family's background.

[06:53] JACALYN: My great grandparents came from the Pyrenees mountains between Spain and France. They had been. They had their tickets to come, but my great grandfather was conscripted by the spanish army, and so they left and came here to be. To Porterville to be indentured servants to pay for their way over. And they had 13 children, and the youngest was my grandpa. And I still have 40 acres of that land in Porterville. In Porterville. Not enough water. We had to take out all our walnuts.

[07:33] CHARITY: No.

[07:34] JACALYN: So I was. Both of my parents were only children, and I'm the oldest of five, so on the ranch. So I grew up milking cows and all of that kind of stuff and taking care of the kids because both of my parents worked in the family business.

[07:55] CHARITY: Yeah. Wow. That's amazing.

[07:59] JACALYN: And they were not. They were not educated, and they started out after world war two just in about making a bicycle repair shop work, and ended up with quite. Quite a big business. So what's your background, family wise?

[08:19] CHARITY: I don't have a particularly exciting story compared to that, for sure. I have a much more typical white american mutt sort of story where my parents and their parents and their parents and their parents are from the US. And if I have a homestead like the old homeland, it would be Texas. That's where my dad's side of the family all come from, and that's where many of them still live. My mom grew up in Kingsburg. My dad, until he moved from Texas when he was a little boy, grew up in Fresno and they met when they were in college. And I grew up here in Fresno. My brother and I, two children, grew up in Fresno, right near the Tower district, just south of the tower theater. My parents still live in the house I grew up in. And I moved away for almost ten years to go to undergraduate school, to go to college and law school. And when I left, very typical of a lot of teenagers, I think, who grew up in my era, I left Fresno and I was never coming back. But then after leaving for a few years, I really missed it. I really love so much about this community and there's so many things I took for granted. Yeah. And I just, not to like, knock on any of the other places I lived, but I. Gosh, I just missed Fresno. Like, the longer I was gone, the more I wanted to come back. And so, yeah, I finished law school and I moved back without a job. My husband and I took a big leap of faith and then I did end up getting hired where I work now as a prosecutor for the state. And I've been there since. I've been there for ten years. Yeah.

[10:13] JACALYN: So you've mentioned several times your faith community.

[10:16] CHARITY: Yeah.

[10:17] JACALYN: The fact that you're a Christian, that seems central to your foundation, to who you are.

[10:26] CHARITY: Absolutely.

[10:28] JACALYN: It also is for me.

[10:31] CHARITY: Can you tell me more?

[10:33] JACALYN: Well, when you're milking cows every morning in the freezing cold and the hot summers, you really get a sense of the seasons and life and death, all the animals that are born and buried. And that really was the foundation, I think, of my spiritual development. But I was part of the Methodist church as a youth, did all those service trips, all of those good fun things. I went to seminary.

[11:12] CHARITY: Did you?

[11:13] JACALYN: Discovered that there was no possible way I could ever fit into a church, huh. So I'm a member of a church here locally because it's in the neighborhood where I serve. I'm involved with a nonprofit and I love the people I've known. Some of them for over 50 years. And there's no way that those walls can contain any sense of God that I have.

[11:49] CHARITY: In what way do you mean?

[11:51] JACALYN: Well, it's. This is one of those. Don't get me started, because we probably will need intervention, maybe if you look at space as we know it, time as we know it, the earth is just barely a click of sand and humanity, and being able to record anything, that's. That doesn't even make a flake of sand. That's dust. And so when we start relying on the history of authentic beliefs that people have developed for the core of our own personal living, I think we lose. We lose out in the directness of being, how we are created and who we are. So I do. I prayed with muslim men. I've been in all kinds of situations with a shaman, with all kinds. I love the diversity of it because I think that God transcends all of that. And then we're all so amazingly interconnected with each other that we need. We need our different perspectives to even begin to know what love is.

[13:26] CHARITY: Yeah. Yeah. I don't think I. I don't think we're gonna need criminal intervention or any other kind of information, necessarily. I don't think you've said much that I particularly disagree with. I think one of the things that's so amazing about that, my tradition, my christian protestant tradition, is the more I learn, the more I realize that God expresses himself in such an infinite number of ways. And as I was young, I thought I knew so much. And the older I get, the more I realize I don't know. And that's absolutely true with God's self expression, where so many things I thought were the kind of easy to understand, oh, God the father, I get that. I realize, oh, gosh, no, that's just our struggling to capture some of the stories he's given us, which are all ways of him trying to express himself to us. Little tiny people down here, his creatures. He's blessed with this beautiful earth, which is a way he expresses himself to us. And the manifestation of truth is the way he's expressing himself to us. And, gosh, it's just. There's so many ways he's done it that I can't begin to. Right. I can't begin to get my arms around it. I can't begin to grasp it. And so I was pretty sure, when I was 17, I had it figured out. I was pretty sure I understood. And the more I lived, the more I got think, oh, no, I don't know anything. I don't know anything. I was tempted to go to seminary because I thought I could understand. Then I would know more, and then I would understand more. And I'm glad I didn't because that would have been too tempting to, like one of the great sins in my life, which is arrogance and pride.

[15:24] JACALYN: Yeah, I gotta ask about arrogance.

[15:26] CHARITY: Oh, I've got lots of it. Ask away.

[15:30] JACALYN: So does that serve you well, being arrogant?

[15:36] CHARITY: But no, not in the sense of, like, my soul. It's not good for me. I'm in a career that really, really rewards it. I am constantly shocked at how rude, prideful and arrogant people just jettison right up the ladder in the legal career. This is no reflection on my employer, the state of California specifically, but rather on the. Just the legal atmosphere as a whole and the whole, all of it. And it doesn't really matter how many sensitivity trainings and, like, diversity trainings and be nice to each other trainings we do. It's a career that rewards people who puff their chests out real big and act like the big guy in the room. And that's just never like, I personally think I'm the best. Like, I am the smartest. But the way I present myself in my practice of law, that is not my style. And so I've had a number of people tell me, like, oh, you need to be. You need to be more this, you need to be more that. You need to present in a stronger way, in a more confident, pushy sort of way. And I just keep saying, like, no, I've got to. When I'm working in front of a judge or in front of a panel of whoever I'm trying to persuade, I have to build my presentation in a way that maximizes my strengths and minimizes my weaknesses. And one of my weaknesses is that I'm a five foot three little white girl. I don't look like the six foot tall, barrel chested man, right? And so when I walk into a room, I don't command everyone's attention. And so whatever arrogance I've got in my head, that's not the way I can project myself. I always project myself as sort of the, oh, you know, I'm just a simple, sweet, rational little girl. I'm pretty smart, but, you know, I'm pretty reasonable, too. And I'm just here to, you know, I'm just here to sort of submit myself humbly to you, your honor. And hopefully in doing that by being a master of the facts and the law that I'm presenting, that's persuasive whereas if I went in the way I really feel, which is, I'm gonna show you guys the way it's done. I'm gonna correct your misunderstandings about the law, about this case, if I present it that way, no one would take me seriously. If I were a six foot tall, like, blonde man who did Crossfit, maybe that would fly. But that's not the body God gave me. And I find that to be a blessing, because that has to reel me back from the way I would want to present myself. That's probably a little too deep in the weeds, but that's a way that I just, over ten years in my career, really reflected back on, like, the person I am and the person who I might have been. I'm just so glad that those things ended up, you know, that my limits have helped define me in a way that's better for my soul and better for who I can be as a person then had I been someone different than had I been a six foot tall man?

[18:55] JACALYN: Well, in most settings and situations, including the courtroom, isn't it important to have that kind of diversity so the truth can be better served?

[19:08] CHARITY: Yeah, absolutely.

[19:11] JACALYN: And I, in my life, well, the. Being the oldest of five kids on the ranch, the first grandchild, the first of a lot of things, I'm fairly well acquainted with arrogance, too. As a tool. As a tool. But that. It took a long time. It took a long time to get. Get to that place. When. When we started habitat, it was out of a mission trip where we went to build houses in Arizona, and I was the youth leader. And honestly, I believed we were going to make everyone in the world housed forever. I was young, but if that did, that kind of confidence did get us started, and we were able to learn how to build houses, how to build community. But it took that just arrogant. Oh, yeah, I can do that. I built fences on the ranch, and I pushed up that wall on that barn we built 15 and shoot, we can do that.

[20:27] CHARITY: Yeah.

[20:29] JACALYN: So, so arrogance has its place, I think.

[20:35] CHARITY: Yeah. I almost wonder if there's, in your life, have you felt that having that sort of youthful overconfidence is seasonally like a gift for your youth to do something amazing like starting habitat? Because I read that in your bio and thought, oh, my gosh, like, that's. That's such a strong imprint on the DNA of this city are some of those. Those startup nonprofits that have just dramatically changed people's lives. And you. You did it. You're the one who did it.

[21:10] JACALYN: Probably the life that was changed the most was mine in the doing of it. Incredible experience. What I learned from habitat was how to take what I learned as a child. In my family, where everyone had value, everyone had assets, everyone had something to give and needed to receive something. And doing that on a farm. And at the time when we didn't have any technical stuff, there's no welfare. How you related to each other and neighbors becoming, instead of going through a typical seminary, kind of go pastor at a church or something, although that wasn't as common then for women. That translated into building houses together with a very diverse group of people, different ages, different economic backgrounds. And for me, it became a way of life that could function in an institution that I actually had grown up with. The way to include people. The builders thought I was absolutely crazy because I did everything the hard way.

[22:51] CHARITY: Yeah.

[22:51] JACALYN: Let's build the outside of this house with all people who are in wheelchairs. You can't do that. Well, you can if you take down all the window frames and the door frames and the fascia board. Know that it's going to fit. It's been up there, put it all out in sawhorses and give people a three inch brush, and they'll paint each other and the boards, and then the carpenters put it all back up there, and in half a day, you've painted a house perfectly, and it's time to eat. It's those kinds of experiences that if you want to cross over into theological language, that's the kingdom coming among us.

[23:38] CHARITY: Right, right.

[23:39] JACALYN: And I love to choose that. It's. It's everywhere and all the time, if we have eyes to see.

[23:46] CHARITY: Yeah, yeah, I go ahead.

[23:51] JACALYN: And my husband does continue to call me the world's oldest adolescent because I'm always about these somewhat impractical ways to do the task at hand, but very practical ways to build the relationships among people.

[24:07] CHARITY: Yeah. Yeah, that's a. That's something that has been so hard for me to open myself to, is seeing that, like you said, that, like, kingdom among us, and that comes through that relationship, building that togetherness. Never do something by yourself when you can do it with someone else, that sort of attitude. And. And that's. Yeah, that's just been real, really hard for me to come to in my life, but it's. But it's true. It's just like this fundamental reality you have to live.

[24:38] JACALYN: You probably are already living it in ways you've barely begun to perceive. I I look at where I live is not in the community I serve. I do not know my neighbors around where I've lived for almost 50 years, in the same way I know the neighbors in the neighborhood I served the last 1112 years. And I don't want to take away from that, asking you. I see on your face you were considering how that was already happening in your life. I don't want to take that away. What were you thinking?

[25:34] CHARITY: Oh, well, I've just been thinking about ways that. Yeah, yeah. The ways that sort of fundamental shift of togetherness has happened in my life. But it would. It would be segueing into just talking about my kids, which is what every 30 something mom just spends all their time doing is just talking about their children, which I could. But I actually. I try not to do that too much in public forums. Cause they don't have a. They don't have a say in 25 years about whether or not they wanted their mom to talk about their poopy diapers on national tv or, you know, that kind of thing. National radio. So I try to pull it back when I get too much into talking about my kids. But that experience, of course, of having children is just a fundamental shift in the way you view relationships and the way you view that kind of togetherness and investment.

[26:30] JACALYN: And in the way you control the relationships, because children only allow that up to some point because they are who they are, and they will be that even with your expectations, they will be. And they'll bring other people into your lives.

[26:49] CHARITY: Yeah.

[26:50] JACALYN: Are you involved with your neighborhood at all?

[26:54] CHARITY: No, not in a formal way, not in a neighborhood association sort of way. But over the last two years, since COVID hit and we all were forced to stay in our houses like they're bomb shelters in the 1950s, you know, we ended up being home more and neighboring more and just walking. And so we've gotten to know a lot of neighbors in the last two years, even though we've lived in this home for ten years, we didn't know maybe more than two households. And in the last two years, I could probably name 30 or 40 of my neighbors because we started to see each other, which is sort of that life on life, living together thing, where suddenly they would see when we were making parenting mistakes out in the front yard, and they would be driving, driving by in their cars or riding by on their bicycles and, you know, give us a wave and the thumbs up. You can do it, mom. Figure out that diaper. You can make it happen. And that sort of, I don't know, low stakes, you know, circumstantial meeting of your neighbors has been pretty, pretty foundationally shifting, and us just getting to know so many more neighbors.

[28:13] JACALYN: And you know them by more than one label now. You know them by more than where they live or the fact that they ride by on a bike. Or the kids.

[28:24] CHARITY: Yeah, the guy with the house with bad guard, with a bad garden in the front with all the dead flowers. Oh, he's an actual person. The guy with the, with the tacky car. Oh, he has a bunch of kids that love him. You know, that sort of tough changes.

[28:39] JACALYN: Changes your perspective, and so does the world change.

[28:44] CHARITY: Yeah.

[28:45] JACALYN: It matters to be open to who people are and to respond so they know you in different ways. I just love, I, my whole life is actually focused on, on the interconnectedness of community with the environment. And it's such a joy to be old and, you know, the kids come, and I love the kids, and they go home and their parents take care of all that stuff. But I'm free and healthy, and my husband's supportive, so I get to go out into all kinds of communities. I can go to the alleys of the neighborhood that I serve in that at 03:00 in the morning, and I'll know the homeless people. And I'm very comfortable. I think that in reflecting on that, my sense of being comfortable with people who are very different, under influence, mentally ill, very different cultures has been one of the, one of the joys of my aging, that I'm just one of these people. And so it's given me an extraordinary life to be able to live this way. And I told everybody I'm going to retire when I'm 80. So I have about.

[30:21] CHARITY: It'S always, it's all, I keep this in mind often that I want to make sure that I don't live so long in my career, that I live to tarnish my legacy. Right. For me, that might be like ten years. I don't know when I'm going to peak. You, you've got a, looks like you've got a lot of longevity in your surface, but I might not make it to 50. Who knows? So I, I want to, I do want to hear more, because you've talked so much about the deep relationships you formed, really across a really wide number of people, and these must have played a part in shaping how you view the world and how you view politics. And if you could share more about that.

[31:08] JACALYN: Well, my, I come from an agricultural area where all the farmers were republican, so I grew up with a natural prejudice and all the liberal things, you know, all the programs, you know, people ought to pull themselves up by their bootstraps the way we did. It's possible. All that kind of attitude. And then typically it happens as you go to college and get older and are exposed to many more views. I became more. More liberal, but very definitely politically responsible. I registered as soon as I could to vote. I voted in all the elections, all that. I would read the stuff even though I couldn't decide sometimes whether a yes meant you were for it or against it.

[32:10] CHARITY: Right.

[32:11] JACALYN: And then I began to see how. How faulty the system is and how this decision made by popular vote as it shook down into funded programs to people who were my neighbors, you couldn't even recognize what the original intent was. So I grew very critical of institutions at every level, including the church, and began to focus more and more of my energy and time on people, to people kind of work. I call it work. I've been a rock volunteer. I never got paid for habitat or my husband supported us through all of this because I never wanted a boss. If you take money, you got a boss.

[33:09] CHARITY: That's true.

[33:10] JACALYN: That was my arrogant take on it. Now I've lost myself. What was I talking about?

[33:20] CHARITY: Just tell me about your background and your political beliefs.

[33:22] JACALYN: All my political beliefs. So I registered Democrat because. Because my dad was Republican and I was in the change the world mode. You know, that was the sixties and the seventies during all the conflict. And Fresno state even had a. A big riot at registration, like in 69, I think is Vietnam. All of that stuff. So I got into that and. And then I started doing the liberal, you know, things like, habitat's amazing. And it's about people. People help themselves and help each other, and that's the ideal. But in the practice of it, when you get the funding, when you start actually having to deal with zoning issues, with the constraints of what's possible, that woke me up a lot. And then it just. You just can't. You can't help people too much. You disable people by helping them too much.

[34:44] CHARITY: Yeah.

[34:46] JACALYN: Owning your own house is an amazing, amazing, life changing thing, but it doesn't fix mental illness, addiction, domestic violence, lack of education. And so as much as I loved Habitat and as big as it got, I mean, we put in an 89 house subdivision. As big as it got, it was in some way not the whole truth. The whole truth is that those people loved what happened when their houses were under construction because they were the center of their community. People would come from all over and we'd eat together. People who didn't know how to hammer would help frame a wall. And we put it all up together. An amazing experience. But after that, then you go on to the next house. And so that. That building that was focused like that, I learned a lot from that. But to work in one neighborhood where you can follow people from addiction, through programs, through failure, through learning their artistic ability, through finding out what's important to them and what they want to do, and to the place where, you know, they come back and they volunteer. They're interns here with what we do with our nonprofit. And one person that just got first semester at City College, straight A's, none of us ever really knew if that person could beat meth. And it's been five years, and the incredible things that are happening in that life for other people because he made those changes, and he's active, and. And he started all these. It's. There's this. Instead of funding programs that give people something that they consume and they just learn that that's how you deal with food or whatever it is, you just go get more free to. To serve people in a way that they become servants of others.

[37:19] CHARITY: Yeah.

[37:20] JACALYN: Is really what I have evolved to. From habitat. The idea was greatest, habitat, but in truth, habitats taken a lot of funding, government funding, that pushes the agenda for these houses have to be done in three months. So you hire done it stuff that, you know, people can paint, people can landscape, but you don't have people out there helping the plumber, and you don't have people because the plumber's been paid to be there. They want in and out. You don't have people learning how to plumb and learning that there's an opening with this company at the laborers level, and you can learn to be a plumber. Those kinds of interactions can't happen when it's driven from the top. Outside funding. Yeah. We have a nonprofit without paid staff. I leave the checkbook with the bookkeeper who I meet with once a month. We don't write checks. Our office has been donated. The utilities are donated. We did buy a property and put a community garden on it that we paid cash for it, and we bring water into it, so we don't have a water bill. It's an amazing thing when you rely on the assets of people who are geographically around each other, they share their assets and they receive. It builds a sense of community where people begin to feel safe.

[39:03] CHARITY: Yeah.

[39:04] JACALYN: And you can't do that with police. The police cannot. They come after the fact. You sure want them to be there and to come when you call them. But things happen here where people know each other from different. It's not. This guy's not only the drug dealer, he also can't stand to hear the crying kittens that have been abandoned. So he will raise. Raise those kids, those kittens up. And then the frat boys, they're in trouble because they partied too much. And that's how that happens sometimes. So they have to do community service. So they take the kittens to get spayed and neutered, and they back to the neighborhood. So they get to meet the. The drug dealer on a different level than they, and they're doing something good together, and then they end that. Cats are territorial. So you hit a tipping point where the cats that have been spayed, they don't want to let the new cats in. And so you don't have so many babies that are unwanted, and you still got control of the mice and rats and other stuff like that.

[40:29] CHARITY: I'm not sure if your cat thing has turned into a metaphor for your political development at this point in the community based asset development or if you're actually still talking about kittens.

[40:42] JACALYN: No, I'm talking about the politics of building community. It's neither republican or Democrat.

[40:50] CHARITY: Yeah.

[40:50] JACALYN: It needs. You need both perspectives. And as people mature, they change their perspectives.

[40:57] CHARITY: Yeah.

[40:59] JACALYN: And all that is good and necessary. So. So I get less judgmental about where somebody happens to be standing right now because it isn't the whole truth. And their footing is going to get eroded and they're going to move to a new place.

[41:15] CHARITY: Ain't that the truth? Well, as far as political footing getting eroded, I just. That strikes true with me. I feel now, at this point in my life, I feel very politically homeless. I almost feel like the last six to eight years has been, like, living through invasion of the body snatchers, with friends who I used to identify with on the political right and people I knew and respected on the political left. Both of them, it seems like they've had their brains taken over and they've started doing things and saying things that can't possibly be what they believe based on the people I used to know. Yeah. So I came of age politically during the presidency of George W. Bush. And so a lot of things that happened then were very formative for me. And like you, I mean, I grew up here in the valley. And so if you were a friend of the farmer, you were a Republican, and if you were the friend of a small business, you were a Republican. And if you wanted people to be able to you know, exactly, like you said, thrive by hard work. If you wanted people to be able to help themselves, if you wanted people to be able to, you know, pursue just like, the good life, it seems like you had to vote Republican. And if you wanted to mother people about their choices. Choices and tell them they were doing things wrong, you were probably a Democrat. And that's how I viewed things at 1617. And that was during the era of just a very different kind of president. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were just very different kinds of presidents, had a very different tone, the types of policies that they believed in. And the two of them, of course, were in combat as far as Bill Clinton type policy and George W. Bush type policy. Now, both of those seem so. Such a beautiful, moderate type of collaboration between Democrats and Republicans compared to what we see today. And so I feel like I'm sort of politically homeless, but I could. I could fit if George W. Bush of yesteryear or Bill Clinton of yesteryear were transported to today. I feel like I could have a place in, like a big umbrella sort of policy based party of either of those. But in the current existing parties, there's just no place for. There's no place for a person who. Yeah, like you said, when you're looking at any number of things, problems you're trying to solve in your community, you don't want to do the when helping hurts thing where you just put government funding at it until you try to make the problem go away. But it never actually solves the root and the core of what a community is looking for. But you don't want to do this other thing where you just tell people that you don't love them and you hate them and you don't like their identity and that they just need to leave the country. Like, that's not good either. And I it's just such a bizarre world to be in.

[44:29] JACALYN: I it's an amazing world to be in.

[44:33] CHARITY: It is. I really hope that what we're seeing is the phoenix burn up. I hope what we're seeing right now is the birds on fire and it's just turning into ashes so that in the next few cycles, something new is going to rise from the ashes, some third thing, because the two things we have right now do just seem like they're both just on fire. And surely it can't sustain the level of anguish and anger and vitriol and division. Surely that can't go on forever. Right?

[45:08] JACALYN: Right.

[45:08] CHARITY: I'm only 35. Is this going to go on for 40 more years, like, right.

[45:14] JACALYN: It can't go on forever, because now it's. It's about the, the politicians are lifetime politicians. They're not people who used to work and came up through the ranks and have that perspective. But the good news is civic education, helping people know that they can make a difference. They can take care of this problem or that problem, and they can be a consumer of services, not rely on the city code enforcement to go solve that problem with their neighbor. You go down to your neighbor and say, that couch has been sitting there. There's needles in it. Now my kids go down this alley to school. Listen, I have a sledgehammer, but I'm not going to do it for you. Will you help me cut this up so we can put it in the dumpster? And you start that kind of thing, and the kids will start to help, and it really works. You paint out the graffiti. We don't have much of a graffiti problem here. We had a burned out can about eight years ago, and a group of kids went in and we painted it. It looked beautiful. Somebody graffitied it. Somebody got beat up over graffitiing it. It just, I didn't, I didn't get involved. And you know that there's been a change in attitude about who's responsible.

[46:46] CHARITY: I hope you're right. You wrote at the bottom of your bio that you're hopeful, and I am very tentatively hopeful that you're right, that people have moved their mindset from, oh, we've got to solve problems at the highest level. We have to have the president solve our local community problems to people saying, look, the political institutions that exist, surely they have jobs and surely they have things they can do. But most of the things that we're trying to address at the ground level, we don't need those institutions to solve all those problems that we as our community can either build community institutions or can as individuals and just groups, small groups of people, solve those needs instead. I just don't know if that's. I just. I hope you're right, but I don't know that you're right until maybe all of the people currently ingested politics die. Like, maybe then we'll have turnover where the belief in that institution and the strength of it, maybe it'll erode when they're.

[47:53] JACALYN: You really, you don't believe it?

[47:55] CHARITY: Well, I don't know. Like, it does seem like this has really captured the energy of my peers in a way that surprises me, and I don't. And we're just in our thirties, so we've got a long time to burn out that energy. If that's where all that energy is going to be.

[48:16] JACALYN: And you have neighbors, I hope you're right. You have neighbors. And with those neighbors, in conversation over time and in how you begin to respond to each other and build. Build a sense of common responsibility for your space in that there is hope for this. In that there is hope.

[48:43] CHARITY: Yeah.

[48:45] JACALYN: It's humans. Humans are social. We need each other. We were created that way.

[48:50] CHARITY: Yeah.

[48:51] JACALYN: And so to put energy into that level of involvement and caring is paid back ten times over. It's just amazing what happens when people feel that they're valued for what they can offer. People care enough to give to them and there's together. I think Margaret Mead said something like, never doubt that a few good people can change the world. Indeed. There's no other way.

[49:29] CHARITY: Yeah. Yeah. I think we're being prompted to conclude our conversation a little bit. So I'll ask first, is there anything. Is there anything about me that surprised you or wasn't what you expected?

[49:53] JACALYN: No, I was just very open to whoever you were and however you came. So I didn't have an expectation.

[50:01] CHARITY: I'm glad. I'm glad I met your expectations by you having none.

[50:08] JACALYN: And how about me? Does anything surprise you?

[50:12] CHARITY: I wasn't sure who you were going to be. I thought you might have been of a different ethnic background. Based on what you wrote. I would have thought that maybe you were. Well, I won't get too specific, but I would have thought you were from a slightly different background. I would not have assumed that you were part of an agricultural background. And I. Yeah, I just. I didn't know that. But that was not what I would have expected. But the depth of experience you're speaking from and especially the litany of individual relationships you're expressing that once I saw that you'd founded and worked in a lot of nonprofits, that was what I expected. I thought that you would probably have just a wealth of community experience, that people like, people like me are jealous of people who just work in an office all day, miss that personal connection.

[51:10] JACALYN: And you do live in a neighborhood and you do have a church community. That's where my hope is that it's inherent in us as people to care for each other. That love, and it's all of its different expressions, is stronger than fear and will sustain past the fear if we touch each other enough to relate as people and not as labels.

[51:41] CHARITY: Yeah. Or to put a theological. For me to put a theological gloss on it, you know, where we were made for that kingdom of God. And that kingdom's coming regardless of, you know, national political divisions or all these other things that are swirling around in the world. Like, that kingdom's coming, and it's coming through individual people and through groups of people and communities, because we're made for it. So we're gonna be drawn to that kingdom. Yeah. Yeah. Regardless of how cynical or hopeless some of us might feel.

[52:22] JACALYN: I think about it as a nash, a natural evolving of human institutions. When institutions start, they're vibrant. They have a leader. Other people want to be part of it. Then resources are put into it that influence how it evolves. Most institutions must become self serving in order to survive, you know, because if they're not there, then they can't serve. So they give the funding. Everything goes to the institution first, the leadership. That's how old bureaucracies. And they break because they no longer serve the people. It's. It's a human organizational development thing. And when they break, then the pieces are what you start building the new institution with. So it all kind of works. If we don't do ourselves in with nuclear war or something like that.

[53:29] CHARITY: Oh, boy, oh, boy. Yeah. That'll mess up your community based asset development. When we're all, oh, dear. We could talk about nuclear war for another hour, but I don't think we have another hour.

[53:44] JACALYN: We don't.

[53:45] CHARITY: Thank you, Jacalyn Thank you, Jacalyn for talking with me today.

[53:48] JACALYN: I've enjoyed talking, and I'm not sure, but I believe we've met.

[53:54] CHARITY: We'll have to meet again in person, in real life, face to face.

[54:01] JACALYN: I would like that.

[54:02] CHARITY: I'd like that, too.

[54:06] JACALYN: So are.