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Last Wednesday, people chose to spend the evening with us at our inaugural event, Pie Night, with the only promises being people and pie. While there was nothing physical people took home with them, we felt that there was something very tangible created that night: a feeling of home that is only created by people showing up. So thank you for showing up. Beyond building strong interpersonal relationships, we hope that Iron Hills Folk School will provide opportunities for members to learn the skills needed to be fulfilled and live as an actual community. We are a group of Birmingham area residents who saw the value in communities educating themselves and decided we wanted a cooperative school-for-life in town. So we started Iron Hills Folk School. Here’s a little about why we did that: As individuals, by actively engaging with the people, land, institutions, skills, and food of our local region, we establish ourselves as part of the community, cultivating a sense of belonging. Engaging in this way has always been a crucial part of our social fabric. Our social fabric, made up by the choices we make in our everyday lives, determines how well our democracy functions. Our local culture influences how we interact and behave in public, how we come together to solve the problems we see in the world, how we show up for one another, and how we take responsibility in a democracy. Our current civic culture is fractured, leaving people feeling isolated, apathetic, and skeptical of whether they can change their communities. Disengagement becomes a feedback loop. When people choose to not be involved in their communities, there becomes less opportunities to do so in the future. This is a cycle we can break together! We have the opportunity to change our local culture. We can choose what type of society we want to live in. If you’d like to work together with us to learn from each other, or just have some fun, we invite you to come to one of our upcoming events.
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