A Community Conversation

With David Jones,
Executive Director
Petoskey Harbor Springs Area Community Foundation
EDITOR’S NOTE: Northern Michigan’s character is defined by both its natural beauty and its human element. In this occasional series, we’ll be checking in with community leaders, getting to know about the work they do and why they are passionate about this place, in their own words. Here, we present David Jones, executive director of the Petoskey Harbor Springs Area Community Foundation.
-Kate Bassett
Q: What does the word “community” mean to you?
Community to me is a sense of place and purpose. I think in really thriving communities the residents take a lot of pride in their community and they have a sense of ownership.

The Foundation just celebrated 20 years in this community. What are some of the goals for your organization moving forward? Have you received any sage advice from some of the founding members?
We’re still celebrating 20 years! It’s very rewarding and humbling to look back and reflect on the success of this organization. And it’s healthy to take that reflection time. So don’t put an end to our anniversary just yet.
Building trust within a community is paramount for any public charity. But I think it is even more incumbent on us as a community foundation. We are here to build and oversee a permanent resource of charitable dollars for now and for future generations. That can be a difficult concept to grasp so it doesn’t happen without a majority of people trusting in and believing in our mission. Earning that trust everyday has to be our number one goal.
The Community Foundation is in a pretty typical period of growth right now. Over the last few years we have started to see more bequest gifts come in and some larger gifts too. As our reputation as a community resource grows, more people and organizations will look to us for assistance. Not necessarily as the problem solver but as the organization that has the ability to bring the appropriate problem solvers together and perhaps offer some financial resources as well.
We want to continue reaching out to people and other foundations to let them know we are here to promote philanthropy and to help them with their philanthropy. Gifts coming into the Community Foundation are a win-win for everyone because they essentially get recycled. As our assets grow, so does our ability to improve the quality of life with our grantmaking. We have spent the last few years taking a close look at - and grantmaking in - the areas of youth substance abuse prevention, and the concept of creating an entrepreneurship friendly community. We are now turning our sights towards the issue of land use. Through just about every survey or report we see, we know that this community values the scenic views, the natural recreation areas etc. There is an important role for us on this topic. It’s just a matter of finding the gaps and where we can have the most impact.
Perhaps the most sage advice can be attributed to the late Jack Clark, who was very instrumental in founding the Community Foundation. He said it is not a race for the short winded. And he was right. One of our tag lines is “For good. For ever.” And forever is a very long time!
When it comes to giving back, how do you explain to people that any positive contribution-- be it time, money, or ideas-- makes a difference?
Luckily around here it doesn’t take much explaining or convincing. We live in a very generous community at all levels. But we do need to be diligent. In communities where you do have a lot of generous wealth it can become a problem. It would be easy to sit back and say let’s just let the high net worth folks make their donations and the rest of us can sit it out. The reality is every donation no matter the size makes a difference. And so does volunteering. Our goal is to promote philanthropy and we try to constantly remind people that you don’t have to be Bill Gates to be a philanthropist. The larger organizations, the larger projects, the larger donations get a lot of well deserved attention, but the reality is there are plenty of nonprofits in our community that need and would welcome a donation of any size or a few hours of your time every week. That’s what our Annual Report theme this year is all about. One drop really does matter and when many drops come together so much can be accomplished. Find something you are passionate about and get involved. It’s really that easy.
We talk a lot at the Harbor Light about northern Michigan’s “sense of place”-- where or when do you feel most tied to this area?
Everywhere and everyday. It’s hard to not feel a connection just about anywhere in the community. That’s what makes it a great community. Doing things as a family certainly brings it all together. Our two daughters make it pretty special. I did not grow up here and my wife grew up here most of her life but was not born here. Our two daughters were born here in Petoskey. That’s pretty awesome.
You’ve lived and worked in Washington, DC. Compare that to being in the non-profit world in a small community. What do you find more tangible about being here in this community, in your role? What made you choose to come here?
My wife, T, grew up in Petoskey. We met in college down in South Carolina. Ever since I have known T she wanted to move back to her hometown. About a year after graduation we moved to the DC area – Alexandria, Virginia – and got married. T and I spent just about every annual vacation coming up to Petoskey to have fun with family and friends. After about nine years of enjoying the city life we wanted to start a family. I guess I finally caved to the idea of moving to northern Michigan. And neither one of us has ever looked back. It was a great move.
When I think of comparing DC to Petoskey, the expression “small fish in a big pond” comes to mind right away. The DC area is a big pond and it is much more difficult to get involved and engaged. It is also a very transient area due to the politics. As I mentioned, my wife and I lived in Alexandria, Virginia and I remember trying to get involved on a local committee in our neighborhood. It was something similar to a downtown development board as I recall. We were new homeowners in the neighborhood, interested in making a difference and we both had good jobs. They didn’t pick me. I have to admit I was a little surprised and disappointed.
We are very fortunate in this area to have so many wonderful non-profit organizations. But there are wonderful non-profits in big cities too. I think the difference is that more often than not, they are fighting a battle against a lot of other “noise” and distractions. Everyone ends up rowing in different directions and it’s harder to see the progress. It’s easier in a small community to find one or two organizations that align with your interest and get involved.
Is there one particular project or set of projects the Community Foundation has shepherded that you are most proud to have played a role?
One of the key roles any community foundation can play is being a funder early in a project or organization when perhaps others would not. The Community Foundation has helped play a start up role in a few key areas. In the early days of the Top of Michigan Trails Council movement we took in donations temporarily and continued to provide funding along the way to keep it moving. Other start up funding has included the Great Lakes Chamber Orchestra, Girls on the Run, Getting Kids Outdoors, the Hornet Health Center in Pellston, and Northern Lakes Economic Alliance’s Entrepreneurship Division. Of course, this does not imply that we will fund every new project or organization. Grantmaking certainly requires taking some risks but we do look at, and measure each opportunity carefully.
The Community Foundation boasts a remarkable cross section of community leaders, volunteers, contributors as part of its family. What is it about this community, and the Foundation, that draws such support and involvement?
It really comes down to quality of life. And I think many of the people who live here are here because they want to be. That can’t help but make a community stronger and more vibrant. We all know the attributes of this area that make it special. We also know that it is up to us to keep it special. The Community Foundation appeals to a large cross section of people because our mission really is to help improve the quality of life in whatever way you as an individual, a family or a company define it. Philanthropy is an important part of any community. But frankly for many of us it can be difficult. There are so many wonderful causes to support it can be overwhelming. The Community Foundation is here as that central gathering place if you will. We can be the resource to help many of those wonderful causes, but we can also be a resource for the donors to help them connect their interests with the community’s needs.
I think many of the people who live here are here because they want to be. That can’t help but make a community stronger and more vibrant. We all know the attributes of this area that make it special. We also know that it is up to us to keep it special.

This is part of the September 28, 2011 online edition of Harbor Light Newspaper.

Have an opinion on this matter? We'd like to hear from you. Click here.

Essay: In Harbor Springs, With a Grateful Heart

HARBOR LIGHT NEWSPAPER EDITOR’S NOTE: The Harbor Light Newspaper is dedicated to anchoring our readers to northern Michigan’s sense of place. We believe a community is defined by its stories, which is why we are elated to present another in our series of guest essays about life in this region. Writer Maureen Abood, a life-long seasonal resident who recently decided to call Harbor Springs home, is the author and photographer behind the blog Rose Water and Orange Blossoms. Her modern musings on Lebanese cuisine are often tied to the fields and tables of this area, and in her essay, we find that common connection of food, family, community. Follow her blog online at www.maureenabood.com.
--Kate Bassett
In Harbor Springs, With a Grateful Heart
By MAUREEN ABOOD

SPECIAL TO HARBOR LIGHT NEWSPAPER

It comes as no surprise to me that my earliest memory of Harbor Springs has to do with ice cream. Two scoops served not one on top of the other but side by side in a cone from The Lemon Tree, which is now Turkey’s. Turns out that a great many of my Harbor Springs memories are associated with food in one way or another. When we landed in our home on Main Street, we discovered a wonderful irony: that our next door neighbor was, like us, Lebanese. Latifi Huffman made us a big Lebanese dinner to celebrate our newfound, and unlikely, Lebanese connection in Harbor Springs. It was a feast that no doubt took her days of painstaking preparation, her way of affirming our shared culture and, in the tradition of many a Lebanese woman, her way of expressing her love. There has to be all kinds of good karma coming off of the table I write on right now; it is the same table that was once in Latifi’s kitchen. Often joining us on the front porch in the evening before going out for dinner, Latifi was a force to be reckoned with at 4 feet tall. She rivaled our pink gladiolas with her own glad, bright pink dresses and matching lipstick, telling stories of herself as a girl (“I was beautiful honey, and I didn’t know it!”) and laughing easily, especially when she talked with my parents.

That was true of most anyone who has come up on our porch over the years, where there is always lemonade and conversation. My father, Camille Abood, came up north from a young age to fish with his father and his friends. He always wanted a place here, and to share his passion for the water and the north country with his wife, Maryalice, and his family. Main Street was the perfect place for him because it allowed him to keep tabs on the town and its activities while still enjoying Little Traverse Bay nearby.

On more than one occasion we arrived from downstate to find a beautiful apple pie, warm and fragrant, on our kitchen counter made by our neighbor on the other side, Aris Smith. The Smiths and their children have meant a great deal to the Aboods. Their roots in this town match those of the massive maple trees in their yard, deep and sturdy. Their men march in the town parades as veterans; they meet life’s challenges, of which they have experienced many, like those maples as well: with great strength and fortitude. Mr. Smith used to watch us coming and going from his own porch, always telling us to drive safely back down to Chicago or wherever one might be headed, and to come back soon. I remember when they lost a son, a young man, years ago and my parents referenced the Smith family in instructing ours, as one we should emulate for their resilience in the face of adversity. We have found ample opportunities to make use of this instruction.

From the front porch I have eaten the best grilled hot dogs on the planet (which is saying a lot after living in Chicago for years), while watching every parade, Memorial Day and the 4th of July, for most of my life. The only 4th of July that did not find an Abood on Main Street was the year my father died, just days before the fourth. But the idea of coming up for the holiday was a strong impetus for my father in the weeks of his short terminal illness. His eyes lit up from their fog of pain when we spoke to him of Up North, how my brother would fly him there, and he could sit on his porch again. If I had to guess I would say that as my father’s soul took flight, his mind had him in Harbor Springs, out in the bay in his boat eating lunch and watching the sail races, or sitting on the porch with my mother.

That summer the house was closed up until my mom and I ventured up a few months after his death. What a harsh reality it was to enter the house and face the fact that he would not be here again. We cried as we drove down the hill into town and as we opened up the house and went out on the porch, enveloped in the numbness that only the death of a beloved can inflict. Harbor Springs broke our hearts that summer, but in the years since it has also helped us to heal. Because this is where we come to gather, to remember who we have been and where we are headed but most of all to simply live in the moment at hand, always with the sense of my father’s presence, and always striving for that same joyous yet meditative calm he found here.

We find it on the porch and in the bay, and we find it at the table. One experiences a marked increase in appetite on entering Harbor Springs. This is because of Up North terroir— which is a “sense of place,” and the effect of environmental elements on the food and drink coming out of that place. Terroir is about how the land from which anything is grown imparts a unique quality that is specific to that region. Harbor Springs terroir begins with the water: springs that bubble out of the beaches in Petoskey or the water fountains in Harbor Springs are like fountains of youth, a Holy Grail. I have not tasted purer, sweeter water anywhere. This purity extends to the light here, yellow light that casts itself across the summer days, and the violet veil that it becomes at dusk and dawn. It’s an orchestration, along with soil, bay breezes, and other exquisite secrets of the seasons that only a higher power, God, could conduct. The outcome in food is an explosion of flavor, color, and texture, grand and fleeting like the fireworks finale over the bay on the 4th of July. They boom and strike awe in us; they echo down the lake. Then they are gone until next year.

When I recently finished culinary school in a place that is known for its terroir—northern California—I wondered where I could possibly go next that would stand up to the thrill I had just experienced living in San Francisco, cooking and learning about food and wine, walking every day to school along the San Francisco Bay, eating produce of the highest quality year-round. I knew that I would not be seeking a position on the line in a restaurant, but rather would want to find a place where I could settle in, cook and write for a time. Ideally this creative life would take place near a body of water.

So landing in Harbor Springs for the summer was a no-brainer, a natural spot to spend time again with family, cook with my mother and reignite my writing, in the form of a food blog. And here I’ve been inspired, like the Lebanese in the Mediterranean are, by the sumptuous bounty to such an extent that my blog posts of stories and photos every week are beginning to feel like an aria, an extended love song, about this place. Last week the quote on my blog for one of my “Postcards from Up North” read that “there shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart.” That reminds me of how my mother, sister and I always toast with our cocktails from any location and in any season: we clink our glasses and say, “happy summer!” That little cheers recalls for us that we carry summer in Harbor Springs with us all of the time.

But the season itself of summer in Harbor Springs does end, always sooner than we’d like. Staying on for the winter this year—that has taken a little more of my consideration. We came for short visits at Christmas when I was a child, driving up on Christmas day and eating Campbell’s bean with bacon soup and my mother’s Christmas cookies and baklawa. My father read to his five children, and we played games into the wee hours. I always made a bee-line downtown to Howse’s to satiate the craving I’d had for those chocolates since summer’s end, and to walk home in the snow licking one of their holiday lollipops. Here we escaped for a short time to a wintery world that felt like it belonged in the story books we were reading from.

How, though, would the long cold winter in a tough economy play for me now? My dad won’t be here to read stories and my mother will wisely be in the Florida sun. I remembered though how my living room in Chicago evokes Harbor Springs in its total glory, with James Peery paintings of the bay and Holy Childhood Church in summer on one wall, and a huge Virgil Haynes silvery winter scene in town on another.

My decision to stay for the winter has come to me slowly, but was finally clear when I realized that terroir doesn’t just impact foodstuffs. Terroir produces…us. We are products not just of our familial upbringings, but products of place. The same environmental elements that make the peaches at Bill’s Farm Market so perfect or the tomatoes at Pond Hill Farm so divine are having their effect on you and me too. Just as our lives are filled with both joy and sorrow, the abundance of summer would not be without the fallow, stark beauty of winter. I have learned enough by now in life to seek the unknown, even the difficult, because in time I recognize that it was out of the challenge that I grew the most. So here I will be this winter, in Harbor Springs with a grateful heart.

This is part of the September 7, 2011 online edition of Harbor Light Newspaper.

Words of Wisdom chosen by Lama Surya Das

Just got this in my inbox today, and couldn't pass sharing:

"A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature."

-- Henry Thoreau

I hope everyone is having a great Labor Day Weekend!

Chris

Fishing off the dock at Fishtown in Leland.