Jeff Yost on kolaches, party buses and community connection

That’s not something I even knew was on my bucket list until that first delicious apricot bite – the perfect beginning to an evening cruise through the scenic Knox County community. On our hour-long tour, we saw all sorts of incredible assets: a lush campground, an early childhood education center, a renovated Veterans Memorial Park, a garden center, and a stunning new fire hall, not to mention the business and civic hub downtown. Instead of music blaring through the onboard speakers, we listened as locals explained the progress in their place.

That’s how the Verdigre Community Foundation Fund, an affiliated fund of Nebraska Community Foundation (NCF), kicked off their regional peer learning session. We completed five of these sessions this spring, and each brought people across Nebraska closer to each other and closer to the shared goal of continual improvement and lasting prosperity. Other host communities were Columbus, Grant, Overton, and Hebron – each of which had its own bounty of beloved assets to share during a community tour.

But it’s not all party buses and pastries. We cover a lot in these peer learning sessions, and this year we focused on donor stewardship, one-to-one conversations, and the importance of building relationships before you need them. In Hebron and Verdigre, we were joined by authors Mike Breininger and Tom Mosgaller, who drew on their decades of community building experience to help communities move from doing their work in transactional ways and focus more on personal and community transformation.

Attendees agree that the most powerful part of these gatherings is fellowship. At each session, NCF staff and the host community set aside an hour for volunteers to share stories of progress in their hometowns. In this hour, we learn so much about our neighbors. We learned what people love about their place, what’s working in their place, and how they imagine their affiliated fund impacting their community for generations to come. As one attendee told us, “It was so inspiring to hear what other towns are doing to enhance, preserve and promote their communities.”

I couldn’t agree more. Gatherings like these are the foundation of the NCF network and provide firm footing as we strive to achieve our mission to unleash abundant assets, inspire charitable giving, and connect ambitious people to build stronger communities and a Greater Nebraska. When smart, tenacious, like-minded people get together in one room, they are bound to discover something about themselves. In the NCF network, what people discover is they have more power than they previously imagined.

What does that look like? It looks like someone in Stuart sharing their housing expertise with someone in Wynot. Or maybe it looks like someone in Diller connecting with someone in Leigh about youth volunteerism, both working together to create even better opportunities for the next generation. These relationships, woven throughout our state, create a renewable source of momentum and innovation. This is the kind of wisdom that ripples through generations and makes our entire state a better place to call home.

The conversations that unfold around a table on a Thursday night in Verdigre or a Wednesday evening in Grant are the scaffolding on which our volunteers build bigger ideas, bolder dreams, and deeper relationships. Those are the opportunities where creative and thoughtful Nebraskans begin building on each other’s successes.

If you’re interested in joining our ever-growing network of courageous and talented Nebraskans, please contact us. You never know what you might cross off your own bucket list.