The Hometown Pride program that is being applied for by the Greater Hamilton County Partnership has an approach that gives me hope.

It’s a given that every community across the country is lacking something. It shows up in several ways.

Traditional churches are struggling with attendance.

Organizations are disappearing.

And government is being asked to do more in individual towns and cities.

This means everyone loses.

When I pull articles to create the “Turning back the pages of time,” it is full of meetings and officers being elected. The names are all different.

And there is an excitement that reaches beyond the pages, beyond the years from the people involved with the projects.

Today, it seems we have a few commissions that meet on occasion and a handful of organizations that are still active. Many of the same names are on multiple lists.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend discussing our busy schedules. When she talked with another acquaintance, they commented that they were bored.

Her response was classic: “That’s your fault.”

I have to admit the number of minutes or hours I have ever been bored are minimal. There is always something to do. All you have to do is look around.

Every organization is screaming for help — the few we have left. Every church is begging for attendees, not just for spiritual enrichment, but also because the churches are on the short list of groups reaching out to assist others in the community.

We need more people to step up. But sometimes we just don’t know how to ask, or how to offer.

Leadership is built through working with others. It’s learning how to get along and compromise, and work together to complete tasks. It’s how our community was built.

It took hundreds upon thousands of hours by thousands of individuals. Not over a century or a decade. Each year.

Early settlers helped each other build houses, raise barns, and assist in the fields.

When we go to the city or the county to fix our problems, it drives up the costs to live here for all of us.

Everything can’t be free; you can’t ask others to pay for everything you do. Sometimes you just need to help … without payment.

These are costs that have driven up our cost of living. We could just help each other a little more.

It could be reversed.

It starts with small steps.

Set a good example for your neighbors and children. Pick up the litter on the streets, scoop a sidewalk or mow a weedy area that no one is attending to; ask first, but offer to help.

It can be by saying yes when invited to join an organization, and saying yes when a project is being planned.

It can be by putting your name on an application for a commission or a board.

Leadership starts by getting involved. No one can learn without getting involved.

It cannot be the same people over and over again.

The next generation of leadership has to come from our younger generations, but they also need to see my generation and every generation in between helping out.

This is how the parks were built, it’s how Fuller Hall started, it’s how our conservation efforts all started. People came home from fighting wars and got involved with making our piece of the world better than where they had been fighting.

We have to show and teach our young parents and their children, to the next generation.

If everyone did a little, there would be more for everyone.

The Hometown Pride effort is an organized and funded effort to remind us how this works. How working together can be fun, and how working together, without a paycheck, helps instill pride and accomplishment and value in our lives and communities.

It makes people want to stay here. It makes people want to come back to live here.

I’d love to see Hometown Pride choose to come to Webster City. But if it doesn’t, we could do this on our own.

This is a step that Keep America Beautiful is pushing strongly, to help our states build better leadership one community at a time.

We don’t have to wait. We can start today, by finding those projects that need to be done, and saying that together we can do it.

It’s the only hope for our smaller towns and smaller states. It’s the hope that if we work together, we can accomplish more, to be more, to build more.

Just like we used to.

Kolleen Taylor is the community editor for the Daily Freeman Journal.