From the Ground Up: Building the East Marion Community Association

by Ruth Ann Bramson

This article describes the creation of the East Marion Community Association and offers suggestions to others looking to establish their own community groups.


Community Need
In June 2007, a group of strangers met to discuss the ‘Oki-do’ (now Shizen) project proposed for the Oyster Farm property in East Marion. They decided that the residents of East Marion not only needed to oppose the out-of-scale Shizen development but also to monitor other issues of concern to the hamlet. This same group eventually became the founding board for the East Marion Community Association.

From its inception, the East Marion Community Association (EMCA) has had enthusiastic support and participation from local residents. The prospect of a large hotel spa operation being developed in our small community raised people’s awareness: We needed to organize in order to have an effective political voice. Other local issues were also on people’s minds in the spring of 2007. Many East Marion residents were alarmed by the news that the town was developing a plan to purchase land adjacent to the East Marion Post Office for a small commercial area and by the fact that they had been out of the process. In addition, there were persistent concerns about the increased residential development in East Marion in recent years, about the loss of farmland, about traffic, noise, illegal housing and other issues that were impacting on people’s quality of life.

We recognized a need for building a community. East Marion lacks a hamlet center and does not have many local organizations to bring people together. Many newcomers and part-timers found it difficult to get to know people and feel part of a community in East Marion. Lifelong residents and more recent arrivals had no place to meet and get to know one another.

Developing a Core Group
EMCA has been fortunate in its initial leadership team. The founding board members are a diverse, talented and committed group with backgrounds and skills that include expertise in local environmental issues, communications technology, layout and design, database management, community development, and organizational management. The original founding board has been augmented by additional members who bring special skills and provide links to parts of the community not represented on the original board. By making board meetings fun as well as productive and including food and time for socializing, board members have become not just colleagues but friends.

Developing future leadership for EMCA is an on-going process. We have four committees: government, action, history project, and membership. We identify leaders through one-on-one meetings designed to learn what is important to residents and how they might want to become involved.

Telling the Story
In engaging community members, we believe that it is important for each of us to have a chance to tell our stories. We use this storytelling approach in recruiting new leaders and members, in how we talk about EMCA and its goals, and in engaging participants in discussion topics at meetings. We think of this in terms of three fundamental stories: the ‘story of me,’ (sharing our individual stories about who we are and what is important to us,); the ‘story of us,’ (who we are as a community and as an organization, and who we want to be); and the ‘story of now’ (why it is important for people to be involved at this particular time in our community’s history).

The Importance of Structure
Critical to building a new organization is work on its structure. This includes establishing how the group makes decisions; meeting locations and times; legal status; funding; membership guidelines and dues; mission goals and objectives; and group dynamics. Creating this structure was a major effort during EMCA’s first year.

EMCA’s purpose and mission were developed by the membership through a process that gave everyone a chance to be heard. While there were several community members who in EMCA's earliest days advocated for an organization in which a small number of leaders could make decisions quickly and speak out freely on public issues, this sort of top-down decision making by a small number of people is not the way we chose to structure our community organization. We felt that people support the decisions they have a part in making, so at EMCA we are committed to reaching positions on issues through a participative process using consensus, whenever possible.

After deciding what kind of group we wanted to be and starting to accept dues we needed to take legal steps to formalize the organization. (It is difficult enough taking on Town Hall without complicating life by adding the IRS to our problems!) There are various ways to go about this: You can consult a how-to-incorporate handbook (available in many local libraries), borrow the bylaws from a similar group to use as a guideline, or consult an attorney. EMCA actually did all three.

How We Engage
Community change is best initiated when community members are in a room together. It is then that a shift in expectations is noticed and reinforced. We try to create the experience of belonging at meetings, by utilizing both small and large group discussions, by posing questions that engage people in discussing possibilities and their own power to initiate change, and by making it safe to express doubts and dissent.

We design hospitality into our meetings. We greet people personally and always provide delicious home-baked refreshments. Before diving into the agenda we often pose a connection question such as asking people to introduce themselves to someone whom they do not know in the room by describing an experience they have had with the issue being discussed at that particular meeting. Our February Cabin Fever Potluck Lunch and our August Ice Cream Social seem likely to become community traditions.

History as an Organizing Tool
We realized early on that very little attention has been paid to preserving East Marion’s rich history, which goes back to 1661. A priority for EMCA has been rediscovering a shared sense of our community’s history and rebuilding East Marion’s pride in its heritage and culture. It is our belief that local residents need to know about East Marion’s past as a maritime and farming community in order to feel passionate about preserving what is left of it. So far, we have hosted three gatherings to share old photos and artifacts from East Marion’s past and to hear people’s stories about the community. We are also collecting videotaped oral histories from long time residents.

Taking Action
EMCA is an action organization committed to advocating for the interests of East Marion with Southold Town officials and other governmental agencies. Fundamental to our approach is our Meeting Monitoring Team made up of members who observe all meetings of the Town Board, Planning Board, Zoning Board of Appeals and Trustees and report back to the organization about any issues that may impact East Marion. They are our early warning system. The meeting monitors have also given East Marion a visibility in Town Hall that the community did not have in the past.

When it comes to taking action on issues we take several approaches. When an issue is of significant and lasting concern to our community we engage in a community education process and work toward a consensus. That is what we did in regard to the proposed Shizen project. We distributed fact sheets and over 70 members participated in a consensus meeting. On some issues where we do not have a compelling vested interest or firm position, we feel we can still be effective community advocates by having an EMCA representative appear before a governmental body to ask probing questions. That is what we did in regard to the proposed expansion at Plum Island. On other issues, such as the Oysterponds School budget, we provide background information to members and urge them to take whatever individual action they see fit.

Ms. Bramson is the president of the East Marion Civic Association.