These weavers are embracing fun and weird ways to get neighbors engaged
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We all want to make our communities better, but doing so often requires doing boring or tedious things, like attending town halls or preparing budgets. In Denver, Colo., a group called Warm Cookies of the Revolution has made it their mission to get as many neighbors involved in their communities by making it fun. Circus performers, low-rider car clubs, mariachi bands, comedians — Warm Cookies of the Revolution will do “anything that gets regular people to connect and have a say in the decisions, storytelling, and culture work of their community,” says Evan Weissman, their executive director.
Warm Cookies of the Revolution calls itself a “civic health club” and hosts programs and events tackling issues as varied as media literacy to prisons. “It’s important to work out your civic muscles and to make them a little bit stronger,” Weissman says. “We provide a local space to exercise civic health by combining important community issues with inventive programs. People come in, they do something fun, they learn something, they interact directly with other human beings, and they feel better.”
The “revolution” in the name is not the fist-in-the-air revolution you might picture, explains Weissman. It’s a “revolution of values, a revolution of ideas.” And “warm cookies”? Well, who doesn’t like warm cookies, he asks. They bring comfort and happiness. And they also invite questions like, “What are the good things around us? What are the fun things? What are the values we want to keep?”
Warm Cookies of the Revolution’s civic life programs encompass all communities and geographies. On In(ter)dependence Day, folks gather to give awards to “neighborhood heroes who keep us both safe and inspired.” Sunday School for Atheists opens the door to those seeking answers to the big questions in life, but who have chosen not to walk any specific spiritual path. The Future Town Tour creates programs in remote rural areas of Colorado that bring together ranchers, students, ski resort workers and many others to imagine a shared future for their small town or region. In the suburbs, Warm Cookies sponsors house and block parties where neighbors gather to discuss community issues, hear from local leaders or experts, or just have fun getting to know each other better and making new friends.
To lower barriers to participation and make their events as accessible as possible, they always provide childcare, translation and interpretation, and food. But when people come, you better make it interesting, Weissman says. “You can’t fake them out. You can’t promise the circus is coming to town and then give them a lecture.”
At the core of why they do all these efforts is to make civic action an everyday affair that you can do together with your neighbors.“‘Vote Every Day’ is our calling as a Civic Health Club,” he says. “We get citizens to remember that we all own our community the same way we own our clothes and we need to take care of it the same way as well. But there is no reason it must be boring or that ‘other people’ should do it for us. People should have more of a say in the giant decisions that are affecting their lives.”
