You are invited to Healdsburg’s community picnic in Plaza Park

FROM OUR Community, FOR OUR Community. Saturday, May 14, Noon to 3:00 p.m. (after our Healdsburg Farmers Market.) No ticket required. No VIP or exclusivity packages. It’s FREE!

Please WALK or Ride Your BIKE and let’s gather and PICNIC in our park. As a zero waste event, bring snacks/lunch and a blanket or folding chair to sit on.

We will gather for a conversation of issues relevant for our community

•How do we keep our town livable? For diverse income levels?

•How can we stay hopeful and support each other in using less water and adapting to a changing climate?

•How do we foster and maintain a more reliable, LIVE networking in our small town?

•How can we create more all-ages, resident-friendly activities and support local artists and resident-centric downtown commerce?

•How do we “grow” an authentic, relevant community to address climate justice?

•How do we support and strengthen our local artists and our local food agriculture?

Wellness begins with the recognition that we need each other.

Titans of industry and advertising have sold us that we do not need one another. We walk around with our individual phones, drive to work using our individual cars, and live in our single-family homes with our clearly delineated fence lines. We cherish our “personalized” health care plans. What the pandemic revealed, repeatedly, was just how quickly we could all literally and figuratively “distance ourselves’ from family and friends.

Understandably and wisely, our children could not attend school, their learning community. We did not gather to celebrate births of babies or any other life-giving rite of passage ceremonies. We could not visit our sick loved ones or our beloved, aging parents. We could not mourn, touch each other, or even see each other’s most precious public gift: a smile.

Now we can assess our “losses”

Public money—our tax dollars—funded individual stimulus checks and business grants (not loans) to industries that may have lost revenue.

What else was lost?

In Healdsburg, some of our favorite downtown, long-time local businesses lost their leases (most recently our beloved Yoga on Center) and, unfathomably, on April 6, my neighbor and our recently retired police chief, Kevin Burke, committed suicide from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his home.

We lost our focus on climate justice as a prioritized value in planning and decision-making. Despite our region’s alarming water insecurity, our city council continues to hook-up non-essential housing and the creation of more luxury hotels and often vacant second homes.

Money cannot not grow a sustainable community

COVID’s social distortion economically favored certain industries. Locally, Healdsburg residents see the flow of new money in the marketing of ultra-luxury tourism and real estate. Now that housing is viewed as a commodity and investors, banks, LLCs hiding cash, and venture capitalists are visible, residents can see the marketing of our “small town”—most conspicuous at the expensive for-profit ticketed May event called the Healdsburg Wine & Food Experience. Though ultimately approved, our Parks and Recreation Commission voted against allowing this event in the Plaza because wine and five star grub is not relevant and our publicly-owned parks are for non-profit special use, not a center for money-making.

It is time to connect! Let’s regain our LIVE community! It IS time!

See you at our picnic Saturday, May 14 at noon. You are invited.

Brigette Mansell is a full time resident of Healdsburg and served four full years on city council and as Mayor in 2018