my North carolina passport
Our family are travelers. They hop planes to other states, countries and continents, hike mountains, drive cross country, taste the world.
Recently I realized I’m the last one in my generation and the next generation to get a passport.
It’s not that I don’t love to travel far (I do!), but because I chose the work of my heart, journeys are mostly in my beloved North Carolina, and mostly to the smallest of small towns around the state. My work is helping people build food entrepreneurship, so I go anywhere that’ll have me to help build safe, legal, profitable businesses. I do work with bigger organizations, but also with one or two people or a family taking a business leap, often in the smallest towns and counties with deep, rich, complicated histories. It’s my favorite thing to do.
Recently someone asked me, “What’s it take to start a food truck?” The mechanics and permits and math are the easy part: we could do that in 6 hours.
Restaurants, cafés and bakeries, coffee shops and cafeterias, tiendas and pubs and food trucks bring people together and anchor communities. But in a small town that has maybe not thrived in years, decades or generations you can’t just ‘set up’ a business ecosystem, which is what is needed for success. It takes years of intention, of collaboration, of showing up. It's a long game.
And in a small town, success takes everyone: town, county, state, and the people who get them to talk to each other. It takes chambers of commerce, the fire department who lends you a classroom, the economic development folks, the local banker and the hardware store. It takes community colleges seeing and responding to needs regardless of whose department it “should” be. It takes offering training, encouragement and connection. And when 2 or 3 people show up early on a Saturday it takes wrapping them around with the good cheer and resources you planned for 10 or 30 or 100 people.
And when those brave entrepreneurs do open businesses it takes showing up regularly to buy something, to share a kind word and a question: how’s it going, what do you need, how can we help? It takes eaters, writers, gadflies, old-timers and newbies, young and old, rich and poor, the mayor and your brother to keep the doors open.
This magic, this ‘ecosysteming’ does not happen in places where organizations are silo’d, when people guard territory, hoard funding and opportunities, do things the way they’ve always been done. So often I see opportunities wasted and resources squandered when people forget that we are strengthened, not diminished, by connection, sharing, collaboration, by stepping out on a limb.
So I am inspired by and celebrate the good stuff: the brave, heart-ful people lifting up and educating smart entrepreneurs who then step up and catalyze their communities by bringing people together at tables.
These are the stamps I want on my passport.
