Complexity, Community, and Change: Five Years with Community Spring
As I prepare to leave Gainesville, I reflect on my time working with Community Spring, which began during a chance encounter at a City of Gainesville Commission meeting. At the time, I was charged with doing community engagement work for the City. Lindsay and Max reached out to invite me to coffee and discuss their fledgling nonprofit idea. The idea had promise, of course, but more importantly, Max and Lindsay were plotting a plan to do the kind of community engagement I was longing to see in Gainesville — engagement that starts by asking the right people the question: "What does this community need?" Importantly, Lindsay and Max understood that "the right people" were always the people most directly impacted by injustice and oppression.
After that initial meeting, I went back to my work at the City and did my best to go about asking those same impacted communities that same question. Community Spring, rather than seeking to make change from inside an institution, sought to make change by paying people to enjoy the everyday luxury of asking big questions and learning the business of changemaking together. I continued to return to Community Spring, at least once a year, to meet the fellows. At every encounter, I found a group of excited folks engaged in the healing work of community change and advocacy. I always left the group feeling energized, motivated, and inspired to follow and support the work of the fellowship. I connected with every fellow who completed the fellowship at some point or other. After working directly with the organization since 2023, I have built relationships with several of them that will last beyond my time in Gainesville.
What strikes me most about Community Spring isn't just our approach to community organizing, but the way my time working here has overhauled my understanding of the catalytic impact of change work that begins with individual and group healing and curiosity. Working within city government, I had gotten used to the slow grind of institutional reform — navigating bureaucracy, celebrating incremental wins that felt both necessary and insufficient. Community Spring offered something different for me and everyone involved with the organization: a model that trusts people to bring their full, sometimes messy, beautiful selves to the table together as they define their own solutions. I love that Community Spring pays people for their expertise. I love that Community Spring takes seriously the brilliance of local communities that have been harmed by the criminal legal system. And I love the ways that this continues to create space for the kind of deep thinking that gets squeezed out of traditional advocacy work.
Rather than asking people to volunteer their time after work, after caring for families, after managing the daily stress of existing in systems that weren't built for them, Community Spring says: "Your time has value. Your perspective matters. Here's a stipend, here's some structure, and here's a cohort of people asking similar questions." The fellowship and storytelling work happening at Community Spring is part community organizing, part think tank, part healing circle. It's imperfect, sure. That's the point. The nature of change is uncertainty, is imperfection, is sometimes rooted in blind faith that, challenging though it certainly is, we will find our way to more just systems, more humane systems, and more liberatory possibilities together.
Over the years, I watched as fellows grappled with questions that had no easy answers. How would a guaranteed income impact the lives of people traumatized by the criminal legal system? How might we go about addressing the challenge of employment while justice-impacted folks are engaging with the sometimes impossible work of reentry? How can we have an impact on the injustice of fines and fees that keep formerly incarcerated people stuck in a cycle of poverty and incarceration? What kinds of alternatives might be possible to ensure that people experiencing mental health crises have access to crisis support that doesn't necessarily involve the police and doesn't therefore escalate the danger of crisis when a person is at their most vulnerable? These weren't academic exercises — they were urgent, personal questions that each fellow brought their whole self to answering.
The most effective change-makers often aren't those with the most credentials or the loudest voices. They're the people who can hold complexity, who can sit with discomfort, and who can imagine beyond what currently exists. Community Spring is certainly advocating for immediate policy changes, but the work is also about reimagining what community can look like, what it can feel like, and the conditions it can make possible.
As I think about my own trajectory — from that first coffee meeting to now preparing to leave Gainesville — I'm struck by how Community Spring served as both mirror and catalyst. It reflected back to me the kind of engagement work I believed in, while also challenging me to think more expansively about what was possible. It reminded me that the most powerful question isn't "How do we fix this?" but "What would it look like if this community could define and create what it needed?" And "What might our voices sound like if we wove our ideas and our language and our unruly imaginations together in the service of new possibilities?"
One of the biggest gifts of Community Spring has never primarily been in the specific outcomes we produce, but in the way we model a different approach to the work itself. Change happens when we create entirely new spaces where different kinds of conversations can take place.
As I move forward, I am taking the mandate to create conditions of possibility, of imagining radical potential, and of loving deeply and acting collectively with me. I'm confident that no matter where we are, everyone who has been a part of Community Spring will continue to recognize that the people closest to problems are also closest to solutions, and that our job as organizers, advocates, and public servants is to create the conditions where those solutions can emerge.
Thank you to everyone who believed in and worked to fulfill the radical potential of love, healing, intellectual inquiry, and community with me during my time here.
