One Year of ‘Beacon Now’
by Craig Freeman, Community Connection Manager
A little over 14 months ago the world was turned upside down by the exploding Covid-19 pandemic. Business and school went virtual, sports and entertainment shut down completely, travel screeched to a halt, and the vast majority of us began sheltering in place. This proved to be a problem for my job at Beacon.
As Community Connection Manager it’s my job to introduce the work we do to the public. This introduction, whether for the first or the 100th time, has always been done through tours of our buildings or going out and speaking directly to congregations, civic organizations, and others. The shutdown meant these things could not happen, yet the need for new leaders and donors has likely never been greater than it is in 2020 and 2021. As I’ve said countless times over the last year plus, “how can you shelter in place if you don’t have a place?”
Accordingly, last spring found me reimagining my job from the ground up.
This reimagining was not super smooth, but after a couple months of trial and error June 2020 saw the launch of Beacon Now. The idea behind Beacon Now was to schedule a time every week where people interested in Beacon could learn the basics of the organization and then take a deeper dive into one topic that changes monthly. Over the last year that topic has focused on some of our buildings in development like Cranberry Ridge and Emerson Village, our Bring It Home, Minnesota legislation, and most recently how racism in housing has brought Minnesota to our current racial disparities.
That Racism & Housing topic is the one that is going to stick with me the most. As a cis gender, middle class, highly educated, white male I benefit from basically every privilege around. Accordingly, I’ve never experienced or dealt directly with the fall out of any of the racist actions I talked about during those presentations. I believe, though, that making progress to eliminate the racial disparities we see in the Twin Cities metro requires people like me to step out of our comfort area and have difficult conversations where we are certain to make mistakes, but to learn from those mistakes and do better the next time. I believe that has happened.
More directly related to my position on Beacon’s Advancement Team, Beacon Now has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams in sharing our vision that all people have a home. It wasn’t clear to us how many people would be interested in attending prescheduled virtual tours. When we’ve tried prescheduled in person tours in the past the results haven’t been great, but in the past year 500 of you have attended at least one Beacon Now, and some of you have been to several!
Beacon Now is now, and will continue to be even as things open back up, the place to learn the basics about Beacon’s work. Every Wednesday afternoon at 2:00 is when you can invite your family members, your neighbors and friends, the new person at your congregation, or even yourself to start or deepen a relationship with Beacon. Beacon Now is where we’ll start the process of folks joining our movement of Minnesotans standing as one on behalf of the importance of home, so if another pandemic hits someday all people will have a place where they can shelter in place.
Join me at Beacon Now in June where we are looking back on the year that was at Beacon. We’ll discuss our successes, our less than successes, and where we go from here. Every Wednesday at 2:00.
