Sometimes the good guys win, sometimes the good guys need to win for all of us. This is one of those times.

Lisa and Scott Carrino are the good guys, they have been fighting for community all of their lives, their landlord has put the building that houses their much-loved cafe up for sale, and they need to buy it. They are seeking $75,000 on the gofundme project they launched this morning to help them buy the building.

The good and fair question for anyone reading this is clear enough: why should you help?

This is a personal and individual choice, no one else has the right to make it or tell you what to do. But I am proud to share my own answer to the question. And I want to be upfront about it. Scott is my closest friend. I know him to be a good and honest and loving man. He and Lisa are the very best symbols of community one could find.

Why should you care?

In his very powerful book of essays, author and farmer and environmentalist Wendell Berry writes about the abandonment of farmers and rural communities by generations of bureaucrats and economists. Since World War II, he writes, the governing economic, political and agricultural doctrine is that rural life is no longer efficient, there are too few people on small farms  and towns to fit into the new evolving global economy.

They are no longer big enough to survive in a corporate nation.

This idea has sparked one of the most painful and significant migrations in history – millions of rural people moving from the country to the city, a wave that has not yet slackened.

This migration has left much suffering and economic ruin behind it, and no one in power seems to have noticed or cared. As people have left the country for the coastal cities, often for bad jobs working for people who have forgotten what people are for, the symbols and factories and businesses and institutions of rural life have followed them. Rural communities and businesses struggling to survive amidst dwindling populations and the devastating consequences of box stores and corporate franchises.

Scott and Lisa Carrino decided several years ago to swim against this tidal wave and create a warm and nurturing place for their community – Cambridge, N.Y. (my community also) to gather, see one another, eat fresh and healthy food grown mostly by local farmers.

The Carrinos have worked frighteningly long hours seven days a week and their cafe is successful. It is a bright, warm, vital place with fresh flowers, wonderful warmth and healthy food. We have an emotionally disabled man who walks the streets of our town, Scott spent many hours searching him out, even following him, and persuading him to have a free cup of coffee at the cafe when it was cold outside. He finally came inside when it was near zero.

I don’t think a franchise restaurant would do that.

It is not a failure, it is a success, a radioactive jewel that alters the history and destiny of our community. The Round House  has reversed the tide, brought something beautiful and necessary to a community that has been bleeding for years,  watching helplessly as local institutions – their small hospital, their independent pharmacy – vanish.

And our town, blessed with family farms,  a nearby college and artists and poets and writers and other artistic refugees from New York, is luckier than many.

Now, Scott and Lisa are faced with an urgent dilemma. They don’t own the beautiful old bank building where their cafe is located, if someone else buys it – “For Sale” signs are going up on the building this week – they will be forced to try to find another place or go out of business. Their landlord is determined to sell the property.

Community is precious, it is something we all seek. In our town, we have fought long and hard to keep our independent bookstore profitable and viable, and it is. That is a small miracle. We are seeking another small miracle. And the great thing about crowdsourcing is that it is personal and democratic. It is also easy to do.

A large number of people sending small amounts of money can pull it off, I’ve seen that again and again this year – with Ken Norman, our farrier who faced surgery; with Joshua Rockwood, who saved his farm from unjust persecution; with Blue Star Equiculture, who saved a blind horse in Vermont from certain death; with George Forss, who was able to publish his great work of photographs. Readers of this blog have raised more than $100,000 for good and just causes this year, I hope we can do it again.

In this, many local people will join us, the Round House is much-loved here, I believe people will fight hard for it. We can  help them.

So I am raising yet another issue, and hoping you can consider it. This is a righteous cause, it would be awful if we lose this precious symbol of community, if we permit our rural towns be left behind by uncaring and unknowing politicians and academics. Good things happen at the Round House every day, Scott and Lisa will never get rich in their cafe, but they have earned the right to their own building and a secure future. Community needs to live. If we can do it here,  you can do it there.

While rural communities have emptied, our cities have had to receive great masses of people unprepared for urban life, often working in bad jobs for uncaring people, amidst great poverty, crime and dislocation. The absence of community is devastating, whenever it is lost. A century ago, rural communities were thriving, many people followed their callings, not bad and insecure jobs working for corporations. We can fight to get some of that sense of community back. The cafe is not a job for Scott and Lisa, it is a calling.

Help them out if you can. A $5 contribution is as welcome as a $100 contribution;

The great question that hovers over this project, that hovers over all of us is one we have ignored or forgotten in our rush to make money our national religion. That is the question of what people are for? Is the obsolescence of people and community and institutions now our  national political and social goal? I believe it is not.

In our country, and especially in rural America, there is work to be done. This is the urgent and vitally necessary task of restoring and caring for our farms, our communities, for Mother Earth. We can start right here and you can join us by helping the Round House Cafe to buy its own building. And thanks for considering it.