The Spring Semester of Arts & Smarts is well underway. Good things have happened already and more are planned for the upcoming months.
Last week, the Junior Leaders (grades 5-8) met for a special afternoon of fun planned just for them. They reflected on the Christmas Store that they had helped organize for the younger participants, and they celebrated the project’s success. For fun, they assembled and decorated cookie houses.
They were very impressed to be 
constructing houses and devoted a lot of time to getting the decorations just right. They’re ready to build more, which is good because this spring we have plans for another service project: constructing Gnome Houses to be installed in a garden at the Rathbone Retirement Community near Patchwork.
In other good moments, yesterday I watched as a participant and a volunteer worked together to roll the book cart out for Book Club. Both are quirky individuals whose uniqueness has sometimes prevented them from being successful in other programs. Here at Patchwork, they have found a place to thrive. It is something at which Patchwork excels.
They needed to fit the cart through a doorway, and I cautioned them that I didn’t think it would fit. “No, we can do it,” the boy told me. Then he thoughtfully coached the volunteer to get the cart steered through the doorway: “Careful…Careful…Slowly…Careful.”
With their teamwork, the cart slid through the doorway without a single book brushing the door frame. I was impressed. The teamwork I saw represented significant growth for each of them thanks, in part, to their years at Patchwork. I was also reminded never to underestimate the power of people working together.
Notes from 40 Years at Patchwork:
“First there were individual thoughts, then idle conversations, then serious ones. Finally three couples and their four children left the jobs and homes they had and moved to Evansville, Indiana. They called the community they became “Patchwork Central”.
First each family bought a house in the same downtown neighborhood, then they planted gardens and met their neighbors, then they worked to reclaim their neighborhood’s park and pool and school. Finally they bought another house in the neighborhood for their offices. They called this center of so much of their activity “The Patchwork House”.
–1990 Patchwork Central Time Line Booklet