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Creating the conditions for people to experience “a-ha” moments about new possibilities for their community’s future and how they might take ownership for enabling those possibilities can be a lonely and risky business. The work is rewarding, but it’s a subtle kind of reward — one you have to search for to see, trusting that it will ripple out into long-term, meaningful change.

Carla Leon never knows what kind of response she’ll get when she picks up the phone to cold-call church leaders in Calgary about a new initiative designed to help churches re-imagine who they are in their local communities. But she’s certainly most energized when people instantly “see the light.”

Since Griet Bouwen chose to leave a stable job to work on her own more than two years ago, she’s been struck with how challenging the inner journey has been for her. More than figuring out business plans or branding, the main struggle has been finding her own voice. But this spring, she feels she’s finally come into her own. In this story she shares what’s worked for her, as well as what she’s still dreaming about.

Salmon Arm, B.C. is showing what’s possible through moving away from the “great optimism” of the last century — the idea that if we could draw the most brilliant, rational people around us, we would arrive at some kind of utopia — to establishing what resident Erik Bjorgan is calling “new habits as a community.”