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Blackstone Valley: Rebuilding vibrancy

Pride in a place drives people to take care of it, invest in it, and drive vibrancy through their collective pride. The people of Blackstone River Valley are restoring their pride in their towns and thereby restoring its vibrancy. One of the keys to the vibrancy of a place is the pride the people living there have for their community.

One of the best examples I have seen of local pride was in one of places I least suspected to find it: a small community in Rhode Island that has seen years of post-industrial decline. It is not my hometown, but visiting there has taught me some of my most memorable lessons about community vibrancy.

The Blackstone River Valley was a thriving area before the invention of electricty with dams running all along the river powering the birth of America's industrial growth. With electric power came distruption, as with most new catalytic technologies, and the innovation which brought jobs and light all across the nation left the communities on Blackstone in decline.

Fast forward.

In comes Bob Billington and his crew: a group of local people from the Blackstone River Valley who wanted to restore the pride and vibrancy of the area. I was on a panel with Bob at a conference in Rhode Island a few years ago and was blown away by him: his commitment to a place, his belief in a future others found laughable, and his personal vibrancy which could light up a room. Bob used his passion for the idea of creating the Blackstone area into a tourist destination with a thriving local artisan community has slowly become a reality, and I was lucky to get to go visit the fruits of his labor.

Meeting Bob and his team reminded me of what it takes to make a place special: people believing the place is special and then thereby acting like it is special and then thereby making it special. To revive vibrancy we need to identify the people who hold keys to the local pride: the people who know about the history, who cherish the uniqueness, who care about the impact of the place on their families' futures, and who have infectious personalities like Bobs. By magnifying their commitment to a brighter future through connecting them with others, sharing their ideas, and putting their plans into action, the pride in a community can be reborn and vibrancy revived as Bob has demonstrated in the Blackstone River Valley.

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