Finding your people - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Finding your community - full of people like you - is an essential part of feeling as though you belong in this world. In this week’s issue, I spoke with Emily Bieman about her love for 4-H and all that it has meant to her in her young life. One of the biggest impacts it had, she said, was its role in helping her to find her community and her people.

 

When she (not to single Emily out - I’ve heard this from so many people, not just about 4-H, but about plowing matches or different sports teams or queen and ambassador competitions) began her time in 4-H, she said she immediately connected to the other kids in her clubs. They all had similar interests and, while they may not have attended school together, would be meeting regularly and working together, meaning there would be a real opportunity to form bonds and be friends.

 

Being a member of a 4-H club or a sports team is, in a way, doing it the old-fashioned way: face-to-face, in-person and hands-on. Meanwhile, many others - more and more these days - are doing the same thing online. They are finding each other on social media and on message boards like Reddit in ways that need far fewer hyphens than I used earlier.

 

For me, it was sports, specifically baseball. When I was a kid, I lived and breathed baseball. I would read any baseball book, watch any baseball movie and pore over not just contemporary baseball material, like cards and weekly sports magazines, in addition to the box scores in the daily newspaper, but I was obsessed with the history of baseball. I still can remember certain facts and figures about records set by long-gone baseball legends like Babe Ruth, Bob Gibson, Hank Aaron, Brooks Robinson and, now, Pete Rose.

 

When I started playing proper baseball - and by proper, I mean on a travel team with people who had similarly dedicated their lives to baseball, not just kids whose parents were looking for something for them to do on a weeknight - I met people who were just as obsessed with it as I was. We talked about the fine points of the game and the little things that the greats did that made them great; things that few normal people would even notice.

 

Being a part of that club - and knowing that there were other people who relished being a part of it as well - was exhilarating to me, so it was through that lens that I spoke with Emily and I could really feel her enthusiasm.

 

So often, you hear people talk about it when they go to college. They embark on a journey they hope will help them fulfill their dreams and they find themselves in a program with a few dozen other people their age who are interested in what they’re interested in, whether it be teaching or film or video games or, yes, even journalism or creative writing.

 

The ability for youth-oriented programs to connect young people with similar interests is a true marvel and, especially out here in rural Ontario, it means so much because of how very spread out the whole community is. So, to be able to cut down on the distance between each other, find similar interests and then facilitate a forum in which friends can be made, often for life, is truly special.

 

And, one thing that needs to be said about programs like these are that they would be nothing without the volunteers who help run them. So, to the thousands and thousands of people throughout the province who create the environment for young people to connect with their fellow young people and explore their similarities, rather than encouraging them to dwell on their differences, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.