“I cannot alone change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.” – Mother Teresa.

This coming Thursday, the Round House Bakery And Cafe will launch a gofundme project seeking $75,000 to help Scott and Lisa purchase the building where the cafe is located. This morning, Lisa and Scott Carrino met with media specialist (and farm and dog sitter extraordinaire) Deb Foster at the original Round House building at Pompanuck Farm.

The landlord who owns the cafe’s building – a good man, community minded and honest – needs to sell the building. In order to survive, the very successful and beloved cafe needs to buy the building, and needs the help of everyone who cherishes community.

They are finalizing the project, set to launch Thursday morning.  They are seeking funds to buy or make a down payment on their building, now up for sale. The Round House Cafe is the soul of our small town of Cambridge, New York, and a powerful symbol of the struggle of so many rural and farm communities to retain their community symbols and institutions

This Thursday, you can cast a stone across the waters for community, you can create many ripples. I have asked for help in support of Ken Norman, the farrier who had a double-knee replacement; for George Forss, the brilliant landscape photographer, for Joshua Rockwood, beset by the secret informers of the animal police, and for Blue Star Equiculture, the draft horse rescue and retirement center.

I’m asking for help again, for the Round House Cafe. Each one of these good people got the help they deserved and needed, we are a powerful community all of our own.

“It is possible” wrote Wendell Berry, the author and environmentalist in his great book of essays What Are People For?, “as I have learned again and again, to be in one’s place, in such company, wild or domestic, and with such pleasure, that one cannot think of another place that one would prefer to be—or of another place at all. One does not miss or regret the past, or fear or long for the future. Being there is simply all, and is enough. Such times give one the chief standard and the chief reason for one’s work.”

That is the Round House Cafe, for me, for so many others in this small and beautiful upstate New York town, a slice of Brigadoon, with gentle hills and fertile valleys and good and  honest people. The Round House Cafe has become our heartbeat, our transfusion of precious community, battered by challenge and by feckless economists and politicians. A place to be in the company of others with such pleasure. Being there is simply enough. There are not many places left like that in the Corporate Nation. This one needs to be saved and preserved.

The sad truth is that rural America, once the foundation of America, has been abandoned by the smart people, the banks and the bureaucrats.Towns like this were once the mainstay of America, now 90 per cent of Americans have flocked to the corporate jobs along the coasts. We will not go quietly. In fact, we will not go at all. We seem to know what banks and profits are for, but we seem to have forgotten what people are for. Scott and Lisa know, they have not forgotten.

This time, the good guys need to win. And Lisa and Scott Carrino are very good guys, they have worked for community their whole lives, they have worked brutally hard every day for several years to make their cafe work.

We lost many of our community institutions in Cambridge  – our small hospital, our pharmacy, some of our businesses and factories. We have a lot going for us in this town, we live in the shadow of Bennington College, are peopled in peaceful community by artists, writers, poets, refugees from New York City, by farmers and working people.

We take care of one another here.

But like so many rural communities, we have been forgotten by  the economists and politicians who lull us with promises of wealth and opportunity in the new global community, but have failed to keep their promises, and who don’t seem to even know or notice how hard towns like mine are fighting, and alone,  for their heart and soul.

Here, the sons and daughters have to leave their families to travel far for jobs they hate working for people who care nothing about them.

This is a community of callings, not jobs. Scott and Lisa have found their calling in their cafe.

Lisa and Scott have been fighting for a long time, running camps, workshops, retreats, making and selling good and healthy food, opening up their lives and cafe to students, musicians, anyone who wants to come to town for a good meal and for some community. The town  has fought hard and successfully for its bookstore, Battenkill Books, and defied the idea that good independent bookstores can’t survive and thrive. We seek to do it again by keeping the Round House Cafe in its building and ensuring its survival.

It is a very good cause, and I support it wholeheartedly. Scott Carrino is my closest friend, he is the best kind of human being and so is Lisa. Each victory for any community is a victory for all communities. None of us want to live in an Amazon/Box Store world, subsumed by the bigness and inhumanity of the corporate onslaught.

So this isn’t the old story of the cold-hearted landlord afflicting the poor. The cafe is successful, it can make it, their landlord hopes to go right by his town.  This is money well spent, an investment in all of our lives. They just need  help in keeping the roof over their heads. the cafe is where it belongs, where it needs to be.

Box and chain stores may be good for the global economy, but they have devastated one community after another all across America. It has to stop somewhere, this is a good place. If we can keep it here, you can keep it there. We hope to turn the tide here, starting Thursday, with the Round House Cafe‘s new gofundme project seeking $75,000. I’ll keep you posted, and thanks for the great interest many of you have already shown.

I’ll link to the project Thursday morning. One of the great things about crowdsourcing is that you don’t need to give a lot of money to help, this isn’t the Metropolitan Opera. Contributions of $5 or $10 will really matter, there are a lot of people out there who care about community, we can at least make a lot of ripples. Thanks much.