Show notes

Communities depend on people who agree to be counted on.

They answer emergency calls, advocate for children in court, serve on local boards, staff polling places, coach sports teams, keep food pantries stocked, and sit beside strangers during the hardest hours of their lives. Most of this work is unpaid, largely unnoticed, and indispensable.

Americans are volunteering in large numbers again. And yet fire departments, courts, hospices, election offices, and local governing bodies cannot fill the posts that ask for more than an afternoon, the ones that require training, a recurring schedule, and a promise measured in years.

In this episode of Durable Good, Ray Jennings draws a distinction between an act of service and a station someone agrees to hold, and explores why the second is emptying while the first is not.

The problem is not a failure of character. It is a failure of the arrangements that allow willingness to become commitment.

Sources Referenced

AmeriCorps and U.S. Census Bureau, Volunteering and Civic Life in America; BallotReady’s 2023 analysis of uncontested races; U.S. Election Assistance Commission, 2024 Election Administration and Voting Survey; Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000); National CASA/GAL Association; National Volunteer Fire Council and NFPA; 42 CFR 418.78 on Medicare hospice volunteer requirements.

Questions for comments

What station do you hold, or have you held? What made it possible to keep it, or what made you let it go? And if there is one you would take on but can’t, what is in the way?

Full Transcript

Around eleven at night the pagers go off, and the radios, and the phones, whatever their owners happen to have. Some are on a night shift. Some are in bed. Others are helping their kids with projects, working late in their shops, or preparing their boats for the next day. The people who pull on their gear and roll toward whatever is happening have spent their days doing something else entirely. There is a teacher among them. A contractor. A nurse. A writer. A realtor. And someone who runs a landscaping business and was up before five. In a town our size there are no paid firefighters; they are volunteers, which is to say they are your neighbors, and whether a house is saved or lost, whether someone is pulled from a crumpled car in time, whether a family gets out of a trailer filling with carbon monoxide depends on how many of them dropped what they were doing and answered the alarm.

The most recent call was a downed high-voltage power line. It had been pouring current into the ground long enough that when we arrived, the soil around the cable had fused into glass. Something ordinary, dirt, the most common thing there is, turned into something else entirely by a force that had been running loose and unattended at the side of the road just east of town.

Volunteer firefighters are not paid for this. Not for the hours of training that made them ready for it, not for the meetings where they relive prior calls and discuss what can be learned from what took place. Nor for the regular tasks of maintaining the trucks and the breathing equipment, visiting schools and nursing homes, running traffic control for accidents and parades, inspecting booths and rides at state fairs, and generally giving over nights and weekends to the department instead of their own families and professions. They do it because someone has to, and for reasons that are harder to articulate but probably more true: they want to.

This is not unusual. This is everywhere.

What we call the volunteer economy is, in fact, the load-bearing wall of American civic life. It is the food pantry that runs on two paid staff and forty rotating volunteers. The youth soccer league that exists because eight parents said yes to something they barely had time for. The library board. The poll workers who run the election. The health and zoning boards that decide what a place will allow and what it will become. The search and rescue teams, the men and women who go into the woods or onto the water when someone is lost. The school board that sits through three-hour meetings about things that matter enormously, meetings the local paper still faithfully covers but that most people never read about until the decision has already touched their child. We do not see this infrastructure clearly, partly because it works, and partly because the people doing it are not in the habit of announcing themselves.

I have spent most of my adult life in foreign assistance, working in places where this civic middle had been strained to the edge of collapse, where war or disaster or prolonged poverty consumed nearly everything people had. What I found in those places, again and again, was not an absence of civic energy but something almost unbearable to witness: people who helped others with no more than a shovel, precious portions of their water or food, and their bare hands. The neighbor who pulled strangers from rubble. The young man who organized an entire relief route from a cracked but serviceable cell phone. A young woman broadcasting critical weather bulletins, warnings about militia movements, and humanitarian information from an underpowered community radio station. A group of young men carrying a woman experiencing a difficult childbirth in a stretch of fabric slung as a hammock to a doctor ten miles away.

It was inspiring, and it was never enough. What those places taught me, slowly, is that this instinct cannot be imported. Outside money can pay people to deliver food. It cannot pay them to be your neighbor. The volunteer economy is not something that can be easily installed. It is something a place grows or grieves the lack of. It is very hard to extinguish entirely, but harder still to rebuild.

The task of outside assistance, at its best, is therefore not to manufacture civic willingness. It is to find the willingness already there, protect it, and clear what stands in its way. That lesson applies more broadly than foreign aid. It applies anywhere a community depends upon people who are willing to act but increasingly lack the time, protection, or institutional support to make a lasting commitment.

I. The Accounting

In 2023, more than seventy-five million Americans (twenty-eight percent of us) formally volunteered through an organization, contributing nearly five billion hours. If you price those hours the way economists do, the figure lands somewhere north of $167 billion.

The number is useful mostly for how badly it fails. It does not count the neighbor who shovels your driveway without being asked. It does not count the woman who has driven the same elderly man to dialysis every Tuesday for six years because at some point she just started doing it. It does not count the informal, unbadged, unaffiliated helping that constitutes most of what actually stitches a place together. Dollar-valuing a volunteer hour is a way of arguing for something in the only language a budget committee understands, and I understand why we do it, but the translation loses the thing itself. A neighbor is not a discounted labor input.

What the accounting does capture, if you read it closely, is range. The volunteer economy is not one activity. It stretches from the dramatic to the tedious, and the tedious part is larger.

At one end: the search and rescue team walking a grid at night. The volunteer firefighter. The domestic violence advocate who leaves her own bed to sit with a woman in an emergency room until the paperwork is finished and somewhere safe has been found. The neighbors who climb to the top floors of a high-rise during a heat wave, when the elevators are out and the people most likely to die are the ones no one has heard from. The volunteer trained to carry naloxone who has used it three times this year on the same block. The interpreter who appears at a legal clinic on Saturday mornings because without her, a family’s hearing simply does not happen.

At the other, and far more common end: the treasurer of the cemetery association or the tenants’ union who reconciles the accounts every month. The volunteers who renew the insurance and pull the permits for the festival, the parade, the block party, the seasonal market; the people who decide, months ahead and unseen, whether a place gets to gather at all. The one who unlocks the hall, turns up the heat, and starts the coffee before every meeting. The community board member reading a four-hundred-page application about a development she has no personal stake in. The court-appointed advocate who visits the same child in foster care every month for three years. The scout leader. The person who sets up chairs, or prepares the ingredients for the soup kitchen meal, or keeps the food pantry stocked and clean.

We have a vocabulary for the dramatic kind of volunteerism, words like heroism and bravery, and we use it mostly when something goes badly enough to make the news. For the rest there is no vocabulary at all. There is no image of a man at a kitchen table reconciling receipts so that a food pantry can keep its tax-exempt status. But those receipts are what keep the shelves full.

II. The Actual Wage

Why do people do this?

Some of it is inherited obligation. You do it because your father or aunt did it, because that is simply what people in your family do.

Some of it is proximity. You saw the thing that needed doing. Nobody else was going to do it. The gap between noticing and acting turned out to be shorter than you expected.

But underneath those, I think, is something more structural, and it has less to do with altruism than we like to pretend. People volunteer because it makes them feel useful in a way that most of modern life does not. Contemporary work is often abstract. You contribute to an outcome you never see, for people you never meet, through processes you don’t fully control. Volunteering collapses that distance. You show up, the thing happens, you can see it. The driveway gets cleared. The kids learn to swim. The vacant lot becomes a garden. The child who could not read a sentence in September reads one in March. The fire goes out.

And it makes you known. This is the part that gets least attention and may matter most. To volunteer in a place is to be legible to it, to be recognized in the hardware store or the stairwell, to have a role that is not your job, to be someone whose absence would be noticed. In an era of considerable loneliness, that is not a small compensation. It may in fact be the actual wage.

There is also something more deliberate at work, which people rarely say out loud because it sounds too grandiose. They are making something. Or keeping something from being lost. To sit on the board, to coach the team, to run the tenants’ association, to answer the shelter’s crisis line at two in the morning, to keep the trail cleared or the community garden watered is to have a hand in what a place actually is, rather than simply living in whatever it happens to become.

Most of us have very little authorship over the conditions of our own lives. This is one of the few remaining ways an ordinary person can point at something and say, truthfully, that it exists because they and a few others decided it should.

I don’t want to make this sound purer than it is. Volunteer organizations can be petty, territorial, and slow. There are people who serve for status, and people who won’t relinquish a role they’ve outgrown, and committees that exist chiefly to perpetuate themselves. None of that disqualifies the work. Every human institution runs on mixed motives. What matters is that the mixture, in aggregate, produces something a community cannot buy.

III. Acts and Stations

For more than a generation, Robert Putnam’s account of Americans “bowling alone” has shaped the story we tell about civic life: associations are thinning, participation is declining, and Americans are withdrawing from the institutions that once connected them. Volunteerism is usually folded into that larger story of civic retreat. The story is not entirely wrong, but the way it is incomplete is revealing.

Formal volunteering fell during the pandemic to the lowest level recorded since federal tracking began, then came back hard. Between 2021 and 2023, it increased more sharply than in any previous two-year period measured since 2002: more than seventy-five million Americans contributed nearly five billion hours. The impulse has not been extinguished.

And yet the institutions that depend on volunteers cannot staff themselves. Both things are true at once, and the explanation may lie in a distinction we rarely make.

Set two kinds of volunteering side by side. The first is an act. You show up on a Saturday, serve the meal, paint the fence, and go home. It is real and worth doing. The second is a station: a post you occupy. It often requires credentialing, it recurs on a schedule that you did not choose, and its defining feature is not generosity but reliability. Restoring a park or rebuilding playground equipment can absorb a crowd of forty who come to pitch in. A child who needs the same adult beside her in court for three years cannot be helped that way.

Acts are rising. Stations are emptying.

The vacancies appear across civic life. A 2023 national survey of some twenty-eight thousand state and local positions found that roughly one in ten, about twenty-five hundred races, drew no certified candidate at all. None. School boards, city councils, county commissions, seats that govern budgets and buildings and children, and nobody filed. Courts appoint volunteer advocates to speak for children in foster care, often the only consistent adult in a child’s life. Yet roughly half of the children who could benefit from such an advocate have no volunteer assigned to them. Nearly half of election jurisdictions report difficulty recruiting poll workers, and most of the 772,000 who served in 2024 were over sixty. Federal law has required since 1982 that five percent of hospice patient care hours come from volunteers, a recognition written into Medicare that dying well is not a purely clinical matter, and hospices now struggle to meet it. The volunteer fire service has lost nearly thirty percent of its ranks since 1984, hitting its lowest recorded level in 2023, a period in which the country’s population grew by more than forty percent and call volume more than tripled.

This is not a shortage of goodwill. It is a shortage of people able to make a standing promise.

The reasons are not moral. A station asks for something an act does not: time a person can commit in advance. How much varies. A court advocate trains for a few weekends, a firefighter for the better part of a year, a school board member not at all. What they share is that you must hold a place on a calendar you do not control, for a term measured in years rather than afternoons. It is a reasonable thing for a community to need, but an increasingly difficult thing for many people to provide. Households that once ran on one income now run on two. Schedules for hourly work are posted a week at a time. Employers who once let someone leave mid-shift increasingly will not. The willingness has not changed. The conditions around it have.

Committable time is distributed roughly the way income is. So stations go unfilled, or they fill with whoever can spare the time, and that decides who is in the room when a place chooses what to build and whom to serve.

You see something similar at the extremes. In places broken by war or disaster, the acts never stop. Neighbors still pull people from rubble, still share water, still carry the sick. What collapses is everything above the act: advocacy for victims of violence, seats on local councils and water committees, posts in reconstituted ministries. Help survives. Stations rarely do. Rebuilding an institution in such a place is less a matter of finding willing people; there is no shortage of them. It is a matter of restoring the conditions that make commitment possible.

Here, in this country, what happens is not collapse but quiet attrition. Seats go unfilled. Rosters thin. Nothing fails on any particular day, which is why almost no one notices. We have more people willing to help than we have had in years, but fewer able to hold a station. What is scarce is not the impulse. It is the room to keep showing up.

IV. A Civic Infrastructure

What will make this possible?

When the country decided military service deserved protection, it did not ask employers to be generous about it. It wrote the terms into federal law. A reservist called to duty has the right to go, the right to come back, the right to the job they would have held had they never left, and protection from being fired for having gone. None of that was framed as a kindness to reservists. It was the cost of having reservists at all.

Nothing like it exists for civic service. There is no federal statute protecting a person who leaves a shift to answer an emergency call. Congress has taken up a volunteer responder job protection bill more than once and let it die each time. In much of the country, an employer may lawfully discipline someone for missing an hour of work to keep a neighbor alive. A person can be disciplined for missing a shift to serve as a poll worker on election day, to appear in family court for a child assigned to her, or to sit at the meeting where next year’s school budget is decided. These are stations. We have built a country that does not run without them yet gives the people who hold them little protection or standing.

So begin there. The categories and limits would require care, but the principle is straightforward: a federal floor establishing the right to serve in certain essential civic stations without losing your job. That protection should extend beyond emergency responders to the posts a community demonstrably depends on. Build it along the lines of reservist protection, with notice given in advance, protection against retaliation, and a job waiting when the person returns.

Then address the cost of entry. Before a person may answer a crisis line, advocate for a child in court, sit with the dying, or enter a burning building, the required training can run from a long weekend to the better part of a year. These standards are sound. But the costs, in time and out-of-pocket expense, are often borne by the volunteer. A jurisdiction that sets such standards should pay for the training it mandates. It should cover the equipment it specifies and offer a stipend that reimburses costs.

Then the meeting itself. Boards and commissions still gather at hours that assume someone is home with the children and nobody is working a second shift. Vary the timing of meetings. Provide childcare. Let people take part without being in the room. A body filled by whoever has free evenings governs differently than one filled by the people its decisions affect.

We have built arrangements like this before. AmeriCorps, including Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA, recognizes that sustained civic service requires more than goodwill. A defined term of service, training, a modest living allowance, and other support make it possible for people to step into demanding roles they might otherwise be unable to take on. The lesson is simple: if we want people to make lasting commitments, we sometimes have to build the conditions that make those commitments possible. Which is worth remembering now. In 2025 some thirty thousand VISTA members had their service abruptly terminated, and the current budget proposal would end federal support for AmeriCorps altogether. Having spent sixty years since VISTA’s founding in 1965 learning how to make civic commitment possible, we are taking the machinery apart on purpose.

None of this stops at the town line, or the border. What holds in a small town or a large city in America also holds in a country emerging from war. The willingness is usually already there. What is missing is everything that allows people to convert acts into stations: functioning local institutions, protection, reliable resources, and enough control over time to make commitments that extend beyond the emergency itself.

This is what a transactional conception of foreign assistance fails to see. Since the dismantling of USAID in 2025, foreign assistance has increasingly been framed in terms of what it secures for us: minerals, markets, strategic advantage. National interest has always been part of foreign assistance, and the practical returns from helping fractured places recover are real. Places that recover are less likely to export crisis, disease, and people with nowhere left to go, and stability draws markets and allies.

But these returns are consequences, not the full justification. An approach that begins with what we stand to gain rarely asks who in a place is already working to reclaim their community. It passes over civic willingness without seeing it, because that willingness offers no obvious return. The neighbor climbing into the rubble expects nothing back. The volunteer firefighter is not pricing the favor.

And this is the point: the willingness this essay is about is precisely the willingness to act without a ledger. A country that can justify aid solely by what it gets back is no longer talking about help. It is talking about a purchase and treating anything else as naïve. It is failing to recognize abroad the very civic impulse on which it depends at home.

________

I keep thinking about the soil fused into glass at the side of the road. Ordinary dirt, changed by a current that had run loose, with nothing there to carry it. There is enormous energy moving through the civic life of this country, real and renewable and more abundant than the pessimists claim. We show up in large numbers to fill sandbags during floods, start a meal train for a family in crisis, and carry water up the stairs during a heat wave. That turnout is a plain statement of what people want their places to be.

But the stations are emptying. Tonight someone will answer a crisis line at three in the morning. Someone will chair the fourteenth meeting about rebuilding the causeway after the storm. Someone will sit in a hospital room with a stranger who is dying, as she has done every month for a year. Someone will stand at a polling place from six in the morning until the last ballot is counted, as she has during every election for nineteen years. They will be counted on by people who may never learn their names.

There are fewer of them every year, and not because anyone stopped caring. We have mistaken a failure of arrangements for a failure of character. We praise service after it happens while making it steadily harder to promise in advance. We depend upon people holding these posts but treat the time they give as though it belongs to no one and costs nothing.

A volunteer economy cannot be sustained on admiration alone. It needs employers who make room for it, institutions that lower the cost of entry, public bodies designed around the lives people actually lead, and a country willing to protect civic service.

That is one measure of a durable place: not simply that people come forward when something goes wrong, but that enough of us are able to make a standing promise before it does.

This episode is inspired by two things: a recent conversation with Dr. Wendy Dean, author of If I Betray These Words, about moral injury in medicine, and a morning spent in a clinic waiting room.

Dean’s idea reaches further than medicine. Moral injury, the distress of being unable to do the work you believe in, lives in classrooms, in newsrooms, in foreign aid work. That thread continues in one of Ray’s future episodes. This one stays in the waiting room.

On paper, health care arrives as a system: forms, portals, insurance, fifteen-minute slots. But most of us live it as a chain of encounters and arrangements: the nurse, the pharmacist, the neighbor with a car, the person who notices a friend’s illness. The waiting room turns out to be one of the few places left where people with little else in common sit together under the same terms, and it makes visible something we don’t usually measure: whether a place makes it possible for people to use the care that exists. Whether anyone notices when someone stops showing up.

A healthy community is not one where no one gets sick. It is one where people are not left alone when they do.

Sources and further reading

Wendy Dean and Simon Talbot, If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury in Medicine and Why It’s So Hard for Clinicians to Put Patients First (Steerforth Press, 2023)

Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (Basic Books)

Brown University Information Futures Lab and the Listening Post Collective, the Civic Information Index — civicinfoindex.org

Paul Farmer, Bruce Nizeye, Sara Stulac, and Salmaan Keshavjee, “Structural Violence and Clinical Medicine,” PLoS Medicine, 2006

Transcript

The Health of a Place

The first thing you notice is the chairs.

They are set against the wall in pairs and rows, close enough that strangers have to negotiate elbows, bags, coats, and the quiet decision of whether to leave one seat empty between them. A plastic plant leans toward a window. Someone has taped a notice to the wall about flu shots, tick-borne diseases, missed appointments, and a new patient portal.

I was there on a recent morning with my mother. I had her appointment card in my coat pocket, and she had her medication list folded in her purse. We had arrived early, the way you do when the drive matters and the day has been arranged around this one hour.

The room went about its business. A man in work boots filled out a form on a clipboard, stopping every few lines to look for something in his wallet. A child dragged a toy truck under the chairs while his father tried to answer a question from the front desk without taking his eyes off him.

Every few minutes, a door opened. A medical assistant appeared, looked at a chart, and called a name. For a second, everyone looked up. Then most of us looked back down. Someone stood, gathered a coat, a cane, a folder of records, recited a date of birth and was guided toward the scale to be weighed. The door closed again.

The waiting room is one of the few places left where people who may have little else in common sit together under the same terms. Nobody is there because the day went as planned. A cough lasted too long. A pain changed its character. A prescription stopped working. A parent began to fall. A test result signaled a problem. The body interrupted the calendar and rearranged the day.

There is not much conversation, and that may be part of the strange dignity of the place. People allow one another privacy without quite being private. They notice who came alone. They see who is nervous, who is practiced at this, who is new to it, who brought a notebook, who has someone beside them to listen when the instructions come. And there is a respectful effort not to listen as the aides at the front desk exchange prescription, insurance, and appointment details with patients coming and going.

Behind the check-in counter, the receptionists have made themselves a small landscape. A row of gnomish figurines, with lopsided grins and red cheeks, stands along the inner edge of the desk, next to framed sayings the size of postcards: Almost Friday. We’re all here because we’re not all there. The decorations admit what the office itself never would: that the work is a grind, that the week is long, and that the people fielding the phones and the copays know it. It is a modest kind of honesty, and probably a defense, a way of staying cheerful on purpose, eight hours a day, in a room where nobody is having their best day. And the figures face outward, toward the chairs. Put there, it occurs to me, for us as much as for them.

At one point a woman came through the door in obvious distress, her voice raspy and loud, telling the young receptionist in a thick Maine accent that her refill had run out and the pharmacy would not budge without a call from the doctor, and that she had been calling for two days. The receptionist lowered her voice, which lowered hers, and the room studied its phones and clipboards while the problem was worked out. Privacy without quite being private.

We tend to talk about health care as a system. And of course it is one: appointment slots, insurance cards, referrals, prior authorizations, and the endless small paperwork of being unwell. But most people don’t first experience health care as a system. They experience it as an encounter. A voice on the phone. A nurse taking blood pressure. A doctor pulling up a stool. A pharmacist answering a question at the counter. A home health aide noticing that there is no food in the refrigerator, or that the stairs have become a problem.

Sitting there beside my mother, I found myself thinking about both sides of that door.

To become a patient is to be translated. You arrive with a life. The appointment receives a set of categories. Name. Date of birth. Weight. Insurance. Current medications. Symptoms. Duration. Pain on a scale of one to ten.

These are necessary questions, and good care depends on them. Still, something happens in the exchange. A person who has spent weeks worrying over a strange pain, or years managing a condition, or one terrible night deciding whether to go to the emergency room, is asked to fit the story into the available spaces. Many people rehearse before an appointment. They make lists on envelopes or in their Notes app. They promise themselves they will bring up the thing that has been bothering them, then forget when the doctor enters the room. My mother rehearses. Lately, so have I.

A worry becomes a symptom. A symptom becomes a note. A note becomes a test. A test becomes a number. A number becomes a decision.

Sometimes this is exactly what is needed. The discipline of medicine can turn confusion into diagnosis. It can find the clot, calm the heart, catch the pattern before it becomes a crisis. There are few greater forms of practical mercy than competence.

But even competent care can leave a person unsure of what just happened. Many patients leave a visit carrying more than a prescription. They carry a new vocabulary they do not fully understand, a referral they have to schedule, the memory of what the doctor said, or what they think the doctor said. Then they step back into ordinary life: the parking lot, the phone call to a spouse, the pharmacy line, the kitchen table where the papers are spread out and read again.

The person on the other side of the exam room has been translated too. Doctor. Nurse. Medical assistant. Receptionist. Each title carries a set of tasks, permissions, and limits. The patient sees one person in front of them. That person may be carrying a full schedule, an unfinished note from the last appointment, a lab result that needs a call before the end of the day, and three people in the waiting room who have already been there too long.

This essay began, in part, with a conversation I had recently with Dr. Wendy Dean, who has spent years studying what she calls moral injury in medicine. Her argument has stayed with me because it is not the familiar one about burnout. Many clinicians, she says, are not simply tired. They are distressed because they are asked to practice in conditions that prevent them from doing what they believe good care requires. The doctor who knows a patient needs forty minutes and has fifteen. The nurse who can see that the discharge instructions will not survive contact with the patient’s actual kitchen, actual stairs, actual life. The injury is not to the schedule. It is to the conscience.

The term itself was borrowed from the military, where it first described soldiers ordered to act against their own conscience. Dean’s insight was to see it in medicine. But I suspect it lives anywhere people are asked to do work they believe in under conditions that make it impossible: in classrooms, in newsrooms, in the foreign aid work where I spent much of my career. That is an essay for another day. In the clinic, it looks like this.

A fifteen-minute appointment may contain a problem that took years to develop. Diabetes shaped by income, food, and work. A fall shaped by the stairs and the rugs and the fact that no one has been in the house for three days. The provider may know all this. Knowing does not mean there is an easy answer. Write the prescription. But will it be filled? Recommend rest. But who can stop working? Ask the patient to come back in two weeks. But who will drive?

This is where frustration travels in both directions. The patient leaves wondering whether anyone really understood. The provider turns back to the screen, finishes the note, and steps into the next room. The patient wants more time. The provider wants more time. The schedule allows neither. It is a strange kind of mutual disappointment, and nobody in the room designed it.

The appointment, it turns out, is only the visible part of health care. Much of the rest happens elsewhere. Arthur Kleinman, the psychiatrist and anthropologist, made a distinction I find useful: medicine treats disease, but people live through illness. Disease can be named in a chart. Illness is what happens to the person who has to live with the chart’s conclusion: the fear before the test, the cost of missing work, the strain on a spouse, the new calculation of what the body can and cannot do.

And illness, unlike disease, is lived in a place. What happens after the visit depends on arrangements no chart records: a car that starts, a pharmacy that is open, a road that is passable in winter, a relative or neighbor who can drive, a library where someone can print the form, a local paper that explains a change in services, a person who knows enough to check back in.

Researchers at Brown University have begun measuring conditions like these - library use, medical debt, the presence of local news - in what they call a Civic Information Index, a way of asking whether people can find information, trust it, and act on it before a problem becomes an emergency. None of this looks like medicine. Almost none of it appears on a chart. Yet it can decide whether a diagnosis becomes a plan, whether a plan becomes treatment, and whether treatment becomes recovery.

We often ask whether a place has good health care. That is the right question, but not the only one. We should also ask whether the place makes it possible for people to use the care that exists. Can they get there? Can they afford what is prescribed? Can they understand what they are told? Does anyone notice when they stop showing up?

In the waiting room, the door opened again, and the medical assistant called my mother’s name. We both looked up. She gathered her coat and her purse and the folded medication list, and I quietly rehearsed the questions we had discussed in the car.

What happened next depended partly on the skill of the people behind that door, and they were careful and kind. But it also depended on what waited outside it. The drive home. The pharmacy. The follow-up. The next round of tests. What the doctor said, remembered right. The neighbors. Me.

No place can prevent illness. Bodies fail. Parents age. Test results come back with news no one wanted. The question is not whether a place can keep everyone well.

The question is what happens when people are not.

A healthy community is not one where no one gets sick.

It is one where people are not left alone when they do.

Ray Jennings has been away from Durable Good for two months. A Maine spring will do that — the list of things requiring attention is long, and it doesn’t negotiate.

This podcast is inspired by a Maine Spring and a chance encounter with a civil wedding that Ray wasn’t expecting to walk into. Just a couple, a clerk behind a high counter, a pen on a chain, and the quiet machinery of public record-keeping doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. It’s the kind of moment that shouldn’t be all that extraordinary. It stayed with him anyway.

What it clarified was how much the word maintenance actually contains. Not just the physical kind — the woodpile, the truck, the gutter, the boat that needs attention before it can go in the water. But the civic kind too: the clerk who learned the procedure from someone before her, the town budget that kept the lights on, the filing system that means a marriage is real on Monday morning. And beyond that, the institutional kind — training the successor, honoring the contract, keeping enough trust in the system that people still believe it will do what it says. And the moral kind, which is the hardest to name: the work of asking what we’ve inherited, what we owe, and what obligations come simply from living alongside other people in a particular place.

Drawing on Stewart Brand’s Maintenance of Everything and a previous Durable Good conversation about war and mutual aid in the country of Sudan, Ray makes the case that change without maintenance is its own kind of vanity. It loves the announcement and forgets the aftermath. It builds the new thing and never quite gets around to asking who will staff it, fund it, repair it, and answer for it once everyone else has moved on. Spring in Maine has no patience for that kind of thinking. Thirty minutes. You'll notice the word everywhere afterward.

Referenced:

* Stewart Brand, Maintenance of Everything (2024)

* Durable Good, An Interview with Razan Abd el Haque and Courtney Brown of Proximity2 Humanity.

Razan Abd El Haque and Courtney Brown trace the arc of their lives from early awakenings about responsibility and service to decades of community-based work in conflict settings and at home. From founding Proximity International to amplify voices amid war, to launching Proximity2Humanity to advance community-based solutions in the aftermath of war or in the face of local challenges, Courtney and Razan take a deeply humanitarian approach to the way that they encounter communities and the people that live in them.

What emerges in this conversation is not only a record of humanitarian action, but a portrait of partnership. Their respect for each other, and for the communities they accompany - from Sudan to Albemarle, North Carolina - is steady, unmistakable, and inspiring. See more, including ways to support their work at Proximity2Humanity.org

This episode of Durable Good looks at bearing witness as a form of public service in a time when civic values are ignored as coercive authority works to entrench its power. Drawing on examples from Cairo, Tehran, Minneapolis, and historical moments of transition, the episode examines how acts of coordination and mutual aid preserve dignity, civic life, and social ties under threat.

The essay explores why coercive power seeks to isolate and fragment collective opposition, how community response can succeed or fail during periods of uncertainty, and why sustained relationships and mutual obligation are central to resilience and resistance.

Themes include:

Bearing witness as civic responsibility

Collective response as an adaptive social capacity

Visibility, power, and the struggle over shared understanding

Interregnums and lessons from Poland, South Africa, and the Baltic states

Why restraint, individualized responses, and mutual obligation shape outcomes in unsettled times

Referenced thinkers and voices:

Mark Carney on global “rupture”

Émile Durkheim and Karl Weick on collective behavior

Nicholas Christakis on social instincts

Antonio Gramsci on interregnums

Reverend James Martin on one-to-one care in difficult moments

This episode is not a call to heroism, but a recognition that public service often takes the form of sustained, relational action that protects shared life and civic capacity.

Editors note

This episode began as something celebratory and ended up becoming something else.

It’s a reflection on what the end of the year tends to make briefly visible: the shape of our social lives, the relationships that are present, the ones that have drifted, and the small, often awkward moments where connection still surprises us.

Moving between research, memory, and lived experience, this episode explores how social isolation doesn’t usually arrive as a dramatic rupture, but as something more subtle. A narrowing of time. Fewer chances for conversations to wander. Lives that become more managed, more private, and more carefully arranged.

At the center of the episode is a personal story from earlier in life, when time felt looser and connection easier to stumble into. Not because of wisdom or intention, but because there was more room for it. That memory opens into a broader reflection on what we lose when everyday interactions are streamlined, and what still remains possible in brief, low-stakes encounters with others.

The episode also touches on research about so-called “weak ties” and why fleeting interactions with acquaintances or strangers can matter more than we expect, not because they lead anywhere, but because they restore a sense of mutual recognition and shared humanity.

This is not an argument. And it isn’t advice.

It’s an attempt to sit with what the season reveals, to notice the conditions that make connection possible, and to consider what might linger once the holidays pass and daily life resumes.

As always with Durable Good, the focus is on attention rather than instruction, and on understanding the small, ordinary practices that help shared life hold together.

Thank you for listening. See you in the new year.

Transcript: What December Makes Visible

On a cold evening earlier this month, I caught myself scrolling through old text and WhatsApp threads. Messages from months ago. Conversations that once moved quickly…and then slowed.

There were a few names I realized I hadn’t responded to or hadn’t quite known how to pick up again. In one case, I wasn’t sure what to say to someone in the middle of something hard. In another, I hadn’t found a way to speak honestly about my own life and its complications without sounding partial or evasive.

It was a quiet, uncomfortable moment of recognition, made more uncomfortable by the way the holiday season arrives wrapped in celebration and talk of connection. In that moment, I could see how I had let some relationships thin. How I hadn’t reached out enough. And how, both online and off, I had stayed busy enough to avoid more spontaneous, revealing encounters with other people.

I’m fortunate to have close family nearby, and a strong circle of friends, collaborators, and neighbors. And at the same time, I feel the absence of many people who matter to me - friends and colleagues in other places, other countries, and other phases of life. I also feel the ache of something less specific: the loss of unplanned encounters.

December has a way of making these feelings harder to ignore. I find myself noticing how social isolation can take hold even in busy, outwardly connected lives. Time is carefully managed. Shared space for surprising, unexpected conversations is harder to come by. Isolation accumulates quietly, narrowing deeper connective interactions across the communities we move through.

Long-term research suggests this pattern has been growing. Compared with the late twentieth century, people report fewer close friends, lower participation in shared civic and community institutions, and less time spent in informal public life. Lives are more planned and more private than they once were. Even small exchanges can begin to feel too time-consuming, when a message will do.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development adds another layer to this picture. For more than eighty years, researchers have followed people across their lives and found that many relationships that mattered - and were later lost - didn’t end through conflict or betrayal. They were simply left unattended, while opportunities for new, spontaneous connections were often postponed.

Sitting with this has brought back a memory from a much earlier time in my life, when connection felt easier to stumble into - not because I was wiser, but because there was more room for it.

Years ago, during a gap in my college years, I hitchhiked across the country.

It wasn’t especially brave or romantic. Mostly it was awkward, occasionally uncomfortable, and entirely dependent on the generosity of strangers.

But during those rides - and a few unplanned stays along the way - I had some of the most intense and revealing conversations of my life up to that point.

Long, unguarded talks with people whose names I sometimes never learned, and whom I would never see again.

What struck me then - and still does - is how quickly those conversations cut past the surface.

People talked about loss.Regret.Faith.Work.Family.Fear.

Something about the nature of those encounters made honesty easier, not harder. There was no agenda, no role to perform, no future to manage. Just a shared stretch of time, and the freedom to speak plainly.

More often than not, I came away from those conversations feeling as if the world were larger and more reachable than I had assumed. I felt as if something essential had taken place.

What stands out about those hitchhiking conversations, looking back, is how little was required of them. There was no plan beyond the next stretch of road. No expectation that the exchange would become something lasting. No pressure to curate who was speaking or where the conversation needed to go. The encounter existed within a bounded piece of time and then dissolved. That constraint made it easier to speak plainly.

There have been versions of this since then, in different settings - moments when people speak more directly about their vulnerabilities, what matters deeply to them, what they worry about, what they hope for. Those exchanges still happen. But many of the conditions that make them possible are harder to come by now.

Social interactions are more purposeful. Encounters tend to arrive with roles already assigned and outcomes already implied. The small inefficiencies that once allowed conversations to wander are often engineered out of our lives.

And yet, the capacity for connection itself does not disappear. If anything, its value becomes clearer in its absence. It shows up in modest, low-stakes moments: an unexpected exchange with an acquaintance that deepens understanding, a ventured conversation with a stranger, an interaction that carries no obligation to continue.

There is a growing body of research that helps explain why these moments matter, and why they feel the way that they do. What are often called weak ties - brief, low-commitment interactions - can carry more weight than they seem. Even when they don’t develop into anything enduring, they can interrupt social isolation by restoring a sense of mutual recognition: a reminder that we are intelligible to one another, part of something shared, and not as separate as our routines often suggest.

It brings to mind a line from the 1971 film Harold and Maude, that captures this with unusual clarity. After Maude, played by Ruth Gordon, is complimented on her ease with people she shrugs and replies, “Well, they’re my species.”

Exactly.

The holiday season tends to create more space for these moments. Not because it resolves anything, but because routines loosen. People linger. Shared spaces fill. The threshold for interaction lowers.

When the season passes, most of what we notice will fade. Some of it will be absorbed back into habit. But a residue can remain: an awareness of how narrow or generous our arrangements have become, and how much of our shared life and the health of our communities depends on those arrangements staying open.

That awareness does not tell us what to do next.

It simply changes how we see what is already there.

Thank you for being part of Durable Good. Happy New Year.

Jason Aplon has spent more than three decades working in some of the most difficult post-war and transitional environments in the world. A deeply thoughtful colleague and widely respected practitioner, he has worked in more than 30 countries with communities that are fragmenting, recovering from violence, or trying to rebuild a political center after the guns fall silent. His work has placed him on the front lines of post-war transitions - where former fighters return home, institutions falter or begin again, and the social contracts that once held people together must somehow be rebuilt.

In our conversation, Jason begins in Bosnia in the early 1990s, reflecting on what he witnessed in the aftermath of ethnic cleansing and civil war. From there, he traces the broader forces that shape both conflict and recovery: how political entrepreneurs manipulate fear, how ordinary people navigate the uncertainty of collapsing systems, and how the international community sometimes helps, and sometimes inadvertently harms, the ability of communities to move forward.

He speaks with clarity about the patterns he’s seen across contexts:

* what really drives communities apart,

* what allows them to consider, and act on, reconciliation,

* why peace agreements may not resolve what matters most, and

* why local actors, not external ones, ultimately determine whether recovery takes root.

This episode is a grounded, unvarnished look at what it takes for societies to come back from the brink, offered by someone who has spent his professional life in the hard, slow work of helping them do so.

Welcome to Durable Good. Today I am revisiting an earlier post, something I published on Durable Good in July of 2025. It's titled Rescue 10, and it’s about my experience as a volunteer firefighter and being new to volunteer firefighting in our small town - and my observations about the relationships and the things that volunteer firefighters do for their communities. Many of you asked that I turn this essay into an audio publication, so I’m getting around to doing that here. Thank you for those requests and for the encouragement. It means a great deal. So here you go. An audio version of Rescue 10, originally published on Durable Good on July 3, 2025. I hope you enjoy.

Community isn’t consensus; it’s persistence. This episode traces how people build and sustain it across town halls, conflict zones, digital spaces, and everyday life — and why staying together is still the hardest and most necessary work we do.

A brief reflection for the open road: on patience, proximity, and the choreography of shared life. Mile by mile.