For the past month and a half, Hanai has been embarking on a listening project. We are listening to members of the community to help us get a better picture of what our community needs. We have the land, the building design, and our mission statement decided, and the listening project is designed to help us make decisions going forward about how the building will best serve our community.
It has been a great honor to listen to our community. This is a place full of people who are passionate about where they live and full of gratitude and hope about the connections that they have made and will make while living here. We’ve listened to the recently arrived and the generationally rooted. We’ve listened to grassroots leaders, pastors, educators and students. To farmers and environmental advocates. To people whose first language is Spanish. To healers and artists. To doers and dreamers. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but you get the idea. And we’re still going.
There is still a month more of the listening project. We listen to expose our blind spots, to learn who our community is, what we feel, and what we need, as a group. We won’t be able to address all that we’re hearing, though I wish that were possible. We’ll find patterns in our listening data and determine which needs speak the most loudly and are in alignment with our mission.
Connecting On This Blog
Our ground breaking is projected for this spring. You’ll notice more regular updates and you’ll also notice we’ll be working out the kinks on the site. I look forward to this site becoming a space for us to connect in the near future.