Linking Individual Needs in our Community

Twenty minutes from Christiansburg is the small town of Shawsville. Dale Mull is a retired process engineer who worked at an Army arsenal that used to be a major employer in the area. Clarence Taylor is a retired physician who practiced in Shawsville for 45 years and built nursing homes in the area. When Taylor and his wife Ora were not traveling, they were involved in MIRA or some other civic project. The most useful people were already very busy. It seemed that the same volunteers showed up for each project. They tried to make the group diverse, but there were different attitudes toward work and doing assigned tasks. The local high school only had 50 students at that time, and all of them were very busy with other activities, but with the help of the civics teacher they did include some on their team. They found the training to be over the heads of some of the adults and more suited for non-profit workers than for average folks. Their team met every two weeks and mapped the assets of the Shawsville area. With input from high school students and adult residents they decided to solicit computers for use by LINC and to donate to the Head Start program, use e-mail more widely in order to work together and to publish a print newsletter with online archives. LINC Letter became an important medium for this part of the county where traditional local media was in short supply. The newsletter has more print editions that is indicated on the web site, but funding now depends on advertising and contributions rather than MIRA money. Maintaining the web site has proved to be difficult; there are just not enough volunteers who will take the time to continue the effort. However, the February 2001 edition includes so many activities for the small town, it looks as though the same people are called on for school boards, volunteer rescue squad, the Ruritan club, and MIRA. Mull said their team's greatest challenge was to get people thinking in terms of community agenda rather than their own or that of just their town. There was a running argument between Shawsville and the nearby hamlet of Elliston over the proper location of the "Welcome to Shawsville" highway sign. It is seemingly small arguments such as this that prevent some of these towns from working together. So the togetherness implied by Morikawa in his report is not a trait that all the other MIRA people agreed on.

As I sat in the First Virginia Bank Building talking with the MIRA group, I realized that their project may have been modest and not exactly the cutting edge of technology (yet I remember well how excited people were to learn about desktop publishing and laser printing in 1990), but the continuing efforts to realize community goals and not just personal ones showed the power of determined small groups to improve life in subtle ways for some rural Virginians.