Amanda Barker on Weaving Lincoln's Social Fabric

Episode Summary

Amanda Barker spends her days thinking about what holds a community together. As head of community engagement at the Lincoln Community Foundation, she's helping bring a new initiative to the city, the Weaver Awards, that recognizes ordinary people doing the quiet work of pulling others together. A neighborhood supper club. A group exploring black fatherhood in Lincoln. The guy at the end of the block who clears everyone's sidewalk after it snows. Amanda's job, more or less, is to notice them and to make a little room for more of it to happen.

About Amanda Barker

Amanda Barker is the head of community engagement at the Lincoln Community Foundation. She grew up on a farm south of Nebraska City and has lived in Lincoln for twenty years. Before joining the Foundation, she built a career as a connector across the state with Nebraska's tourism division, Civic Nebraska, Beehive Industries, and the Mayor's office, and was named Lincoln's Young Citizen of the Year. She's also a dedicated pie baker and the mother of two children, Laney and Kollin, who recently added "official playground tester" to their résumés.

About the Conversation

This is a conversation about the social fabric of a place, what it's made of, how it frays, and how it gets rewoven one relationship at a time. Amanda starts with a story about her kids being recruited to test a new Lincoln playground (the verdict: "best playground in the world," and don't skip on the ropes), and moves into the work she's most passionate about right now.

The Lincoln Community Foundation is one of 25 organizations across the country selected as community hosts through the Weave Institute, part of the Aspen Institute. Over four years, the Foundation will recognize 80 local weavers, people who bring others together across any medium, from arts to music to a neighborhood dinner club. Amanda explains the four qualities that define weaving: it has to be local, mutual, welcoming, and relational. She quotes Dr. King's line about "an inescapable network of mutuality," and David Brooks' reminder that you can't scale trust, you can only build it, slowly, in person.

Along the way, Amanda reflects on Give to Lincoln Day, the Foundation's role as a neutral convener on housing and early childhood, and why almost anyone can be a philanthropist. And she returns, again and again, to the people, the neighbors, the supper clubs, the woman across the cul-de-sac who needed a banana at bedtime.

The Mug

Amanda brought a mug with artwork in the style of Timothy Goodman, a busy, joyful tangle of people, books, trees, coffee beans, clouds, and rainbows. To her, it reads as community: people showing up, coming together, connecting. She points out the two little figures at the bottom with a speech bubble and a heart between them, and notes that the vines tying it all together remind her of the Lincoln Community Foundation logo. As a mom of young kids, she rarely gets to sit and enjoy a cup at home, it's usually grabbed on the way out the door, which may be exactly why this one means something. (There's a Waldo in there, too, if you look.)