Bottom-Up Shorts: How Local Papers Can Help Combat Social Isolation
Jake Loftis at the 2023 Strong Towns National Gathering. (Photo by ZED Images.)
In this episode of Bottom-Up Shorts, host Norm Van Eeden Petersman is joined by Jake Loftis, a pastor and leader of the Local Conversation group Strong Towns Blair. They discuss the ways that North America’s built environment can lead to social isolation and how Loftis used his local paper to combat that isolation and encourage engagement in his community.
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Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:06
Thanks for tuning in to this bottom up short, I'm Norm with strong towns, and I've met 1000s of strong towns members now, and after hearing their stories, I'm inspired to say to others, I've got to tell you about so and so. That's what a bottom up short is all about, quick introductions to the regular people doing really exciting things. And so if you like what you hear, please let us know. And as always, take care and take care of your place, because today, we get to hear from Jake Loftus. Jake is a pastor and a local conversation leader in Blair Nebraska, and as a strong towns member, he is passionate about building a stronger community through some of the most simple things, getting people together, encouraging one another, helping to break down the things that cause the loneliness that continues to be a real challenge in his community. And so I'm glad that Jake shared this with us, and I'm excited to introduce him to you. Enjoy the episode, Jake. Can you describe your advocacy efforts in Blair and talk about the article that you wrote about loneliness and why that was important
Jake Loftis 1:06
to you. Yeah, I work here in my town. We are doing local advocacy things through a local conversation group, and I also work in student ministry on campuses, and I'm part of a rotation of pastors who write a devotion in the local paper, and I was thinking about what I would write for when it was my turn. And one of the things I came to just found myself thinking a lot about was how much loneliness is affecting us, and so with the people I work with, with students, but just broadly in our community, the kinds of effects that has. And so that's kind of where I started writing, and wanted to just connect that to it was a devotional, so it's a so I want to just connect that to faith that just doesn't seem like that's something that I think is something that people are aware of, but maybe not how we connected that to our built environment, and how that kind of sets us up to be more isolated, be more separated. So that's kind of what I wrote about. Had a good response from it, from a few people. Had a lady at church come up and she cut out the article and gave me a handwritten note saying how much she liked it.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 2:12
Bringing in strong towns. Why? Why did you feel like there was a way to bring in questions about the built environment and how that shapes our lives? Well,
Jake Loftis 2:20
I think it's because it's something that we can shape. I mean is it's application. That's something that where we can, I think, as Christians, as we're called to proclaim the gospel, but also to demonstrate it. And so that includes like how you demonstrate it in your life, like your behavior, but also in the things that you do. And that includes how you build, and the way we build the community, the community space, the public space around us, does have a lot of connections and into how we demonstrate community a value that's which is a value that is held in scripture from early on in the pages of you know, even in like, the Genesis account is when God says it's not good for man to be alone, right? We're not meant to be separated and isolated from each other. And so, yeah, that was kind of how I how I saw the connection. And I think it's just something that church, maybe churches, don't talk much about, but is really relevant and really applicable. And people care about people care about their community, whether they go to your church or not church at all. It matters. So that was kind of how I made the connection. Well,
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 3:33
and particularly in this Christian scriptures, that sense that we're created in a garden but destined for a city, means that we're all urbanists at heart. Do you want to talk like, why was it important to write into the local paper, and maybe who is the audience in the paper that you're trying to reach? Because I think there's an example here that really could encourage more people to just pick up their pen and not just fire off a hot tweet or a fancy Facebook post, but actually just submit something to the local paper. Yeah,
Jake Loftis 3:59
there's something about the local paper, I think that, especially in my community, it's a small town where it's not large, but we're right next to a big city, Omaha, biggest city in the state. And so there's something about the local paper that there's still quite a few people that read it, and it still has some value and credibility, maybe, and there's still a lot of people that read it. And I feel even the lady who came up to me after church, I don't know if she's on social media much, and I I do have a social media presence for our strong towns group and put out these, a lot of these ideas, but I think it's just a different crowd that's going to be still reading the paper. The I know the editor. He actually goes to my church, and so he's very open. And I think they're always looking for stories, and they were looking for people who care. And so it's a it's a great opportunity, if you have a look, if you still have a local paper in your city, like, that's a great opportunity. They're always looking for stories happenings, like, you can be a story, even if, even if you don't want to write it yourself, like they may be really fascinated to just write. About what you're doing if you're doing local advocacy things like they want to know and that's a story for them, and they'll pick it up, yeah, because
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 5:07
otherwise they're just reprinting random stuff from across the internet. And it is maybe one of those things that does different by population size. I mean, you've got locals in a lot of larger cities, but I think any city that's 150,000 people or less probably has a newspaper editor that's just looking to feature local content and to be able to weigh in on various themes like this, I think can be really valuable, and it's sometimes a good opportunity to do something, maybe more than just a letter to the editor, although those certainly have other places well and Jake, we can talk about more the things that you're doing, but I want to know like, what prompted you to get involved, and how did strong towns maybe end up on your radar? Like, what's your strong towns origin story? Yeah,
Jake Loftis 5:46
so it started when I was invited to sit on a committee. When we were doing our city was doing a comprehensive plan. I knew through church, actually, I knew one of the guys who worked in City Hall, he was like, Hey, you should come to this. And when I went there, I was just fascinated by all the language they were using and that I just didn't know. I didn't know what they were saying. They were just talking about cities, and that kind of just fascinated me. And I was like, oh, man, there's this whole thing that goes on about these with these people who are working in the city and doing all these things that they have, you know, this whole other language and insight that I just didn't have, and so that fascinated me. And so then I just kind of started getting more interested and involved slowly throughout through over the years. And I don't, honestly, how it came to strong towns. I think it probably just was the result of a Google search, and I just was like, take I'm a, you know, I'm a millennial, so I just kind of took to Google with some questions, and somehow ended up on strong Towns website, and then through that, found podcasts. And then I was, you know, going down the rabbit hole. And as I was kind of going in and learning more, I was realizing how much these these ideas weren't just these abstractions or, like, these good ideas, I mean, which I was curious about. It's kind of how it started. But it had all these other connections to other parts of my life, things I'd felt about, like, why is it hard to, why is it so hard to connect with my neighbors, in my in my neighborhood, right? Or, when new people move to town, like, why don't, why don't we meet? Like, why don't we have access to each other? Like, why is it so hard? What are the barriers? And then that kind of the strong like, kind of, I started realizing there was insights there about strong towns and that the strong towns really answered, and the narrative of how we've kind of built in the separation and through zoning and through car centric infrastructure, all of those things are pieces that just add what kind of filled in the puzzle the image that I was kind of wondering about, and even, like for young people, the young people that I work with, they're experiencing this separation too. And for a lot of us, it's just easy to say us social media or, you know, we put all, you know, the results of COVID, right? Like, the long term results of all that isolation, but I think it's just so much more. It's all we are already trending that way for way before social media and COVID. So I think that that was kind of how I came in with these questions and and trying to, trying to just find, like, what, like the the social media thing just didn't, didn't feel like it was a complete answer, and the environment such a bigger piece than I than I thought, which is funny, because it's the thing we all see, but it's the thing we just don't we're seeing, but we don't see it. We just, it just doesn't click. So I think I mean short version, that's how, that's kind of how got in. And
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 8:37
once you see those things, it's hard to unsee them, like you begin to see it in so many other places. And yeah, I really appreciate even the way that I mean, just as you've shared, as with the local conversations program and being a member of strong towns like over time, it's by gradual accumulation of new opportunities to get involved or ways to sort of weigh in. I did want to share because you work with youth, and this is probably cringe on my part to read this out, but you used chat GPT to create a summary of what strong towns is. And maybe, maybe it's fitting to sort of share this out too, that not only can you write a good letter to the editor, but you know how to edit in chat GPT that strong towns is like this dope non profit that's all about making our financial cities financially lit. We got to stop obsessing over efficiencies and start vibing with resilience so our places can slap again. Strong towns is giving that smart, incremental energy that gets the bag for local peeps, their OG is out there showing receipts that designing cities for cars, not people, is always an L and it goes on. But I just, I thought that was fantastic. I don't even understand half of what I just said, but I think it's connecting with people and communicating and so one of the things that I wanted to close with you on is, what do you hope to see going forward in Blair?
Jake Loftis 9:47
Oh, wow, yeah. I mean, we kind of have a lot of things that we're kind of, we're still early on. We're trying to figure things out. But one thing we've been working on a lot is just crosswalks. Really focused. Thing on cross, especially around schools. So that's something that we've been trying to kind of decode and kind of move that move the needle on a little bit, little bit at a time. We did a temporary installation, and did a lot of get a lot of good community feedback from that. So we're still trying to work with that and see, like, what else is there that small changes we can make, talking about curve extensions and bollards and all those, all those fun things. So that's, yeah, that's what we're trying to do. And just kind of bring that to the city, to the, you know, to the fire chief, to the schools, bring that, bring all of that onto their radar. That we can do these things incrementally, small steps at a time. So that's kind of where we're, where we're at. So in the short term, that's kind of what we've been working on. Long term. I mean, obviously we want to see, like, just people out, connecting public space, things, events happening in town that so where the small, like our small town, which is like we're about 8000 people, that it still has that feeling of a small town where you where you can know people, and you can go out and find them, they're out in public. And so that's, that's really kind of the vision of where we want to see things move. It's not as isolating. And you don't just have to, you know, go to the big city if you want to be in good public spaces. We have those here, and we can, we can have them again.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 11:22
I think just the more I've gotten to know you, you really embodied what Chuck had written about, which is that if you love your place, it will love you back. And I'm going to end it there. If you're interested. I will share links to the article that Jake wrote, as well as some of the images that of the different street projects that they've undertaken in flair, and be able to pass that along to you as well. With that, thank you so much for listening to bottom up shorts. Take care and keep taking care of your places.
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