Jamie Borgan and the art of community-building.
A week ago last Thursday there was a party on the roof of the Saranac Building to say goodbye to Jamie Borgan. You have to know Jamie a little to fully appreciate the inside joke, because among the guests was one of those wildly grinning and waving inflatable beings that used car lots and flea marketeers put on the roadside to attract customers. In this case, the pinkish-orange “flailing man” had been rented to do his comical dance on the roof, while the rest of us chatted, consumed drinks and party snacks, and nibbled on little vanilla and chocolate cupcakes, each with the letter “J” iced upon them.
For whatever reason, Jamie Borgan just can’t look or walk past an inflatable “flailing man” without being tickled.
There’s much more to her than that, but for those of us who’ve been blessed to know and be around Jamie for the past few years, it’s useless to even try to extract her peculiar sense of humor and joie de vivre from the more tangible parts of her efforts. I thought I should wait a week or so after her last day to write this, in part because I wanted to experience a stretch of time without her being around. So here’s my brief and admittedly ineloquent take on her absence:
It sucks.
If that blunt assessment seems a little selfish, I fess up. When Jamie left the Northwest Fair
Jamie Borgan, cutting the cake last year as the Center's first member.
Housing Alliance last year to become a “community-builder” with the Community Building, LLC, next door, we began working on a new website project. The project has had its ups and downs but working with her has always been an enlightening and joyful experience. Eventually, the new website for the Community Building will see the light of day (or at least the light of the internet) and, in that way, there will be more in the way of a tangible mark of her work.
But it’s her intangible qualities that I know I’ll deeply miss and, here, I’m just one face in a large crowd of Jamie Borgan admirers. One example: a couple weeks ago, I met her in the Community Building lobby to talk shop for a few minutes. But it was utterly hopeless. Every time the door in the lobby or the one on the elevator opened, people in ones and twos would first make eye contact with her, and then come over to exchange extended greetings and/or warm embraces. After about ten minutes of this, I just chuckled and gave up.
Jamie worked at the Center in our Community Advocacy program a couple years before I came to work here. She was doing her practicum toward her Master’s degree in Social Work back then and, as such, she is part of an impressive cadre of mostly young people who’ve worked with our incomparable Suellen Pritchard. Suellen still regards Jamie was one of the most devoted and fearless social workers she’s worked with. It was no surprise that when the Center for Justice became a membership organization last year, that Jamie Borgan was the first in line to sign on.
I got to know Jamie because, after I arrived in early 2008, she would drop in on Suellen and others at CFJ during her daily breaks. One day she was telling my then-officemate, Shallan Dawson, about her experience in St. Paul as she passed through the Twin Cities on her way to visit family in southern Minnesota. Noticing the large number of police and sheriff’s cruisers, Jamie decided to get off the freeway, park her car, and check out the siege-scene at the Republican National Convention. She had her camera. She took pictures.
I had no idea whether she could write well, but it sounded like it could be a terrific story. It was. You can read it here. She’s written several other stories for us since, most recently on writer Michael Pollan’s revolutionary ideas about food, and how Pollan and his ideas were received in a talk he gave last winter in Pullman.
Writing is just one of her talents and interests. She’s part of a regular performing drum & dance group. She’s a beekeeper. She teaches Spanish. Even though she’s been incredibly busy with work the past year, she’s continued to do weekly community volunteer and social work.
The thing is, you can add up all her talents and still all you’d really have is a loose pile of her clothes, shoes, articles and maybe some gardening tools. The essence of the Jamie Borgan we’ve come to know is a keen and energetic conscience and a rare and remarkable heart. How that will ever get adequately reflected on her resumé, I have no idea.
Patty Gates, who’s gotten to know Jamie better in the past year as their work at the Community Building brought them closer together, cites her integrity, intelligence, conscientiousness and humor as among her gifts. But she also marvels at Jamie’s “almost telepathic” sense of empathy and how alert she is to the people with whom she interacts and forms relationships with.
“She has this ability to create meaningful relationships with just about anyone,” Patty says.
And that, at least for now, leads to the point I want to register about my dear friend and why she should be remembered here, and be welcomed any place else she goes.
There is no end to the important issues and causes that people in the Community Building network of organizations are engaged in. We win some, we lose some, and along the way the inevitable tragedies and personal struggles that afflict us all, sooner or later, take their tolls. On top of that there is also the inevitable bump and grind of people trying to reconcile their differences so that they can find common ground, align their skills and efforts, and fight the good fights well. It’s a real challenge and in the veins and capillaries of this complex and mystical organism, the difference between dysfunction and good health often comes down to the presence and abilities of people like Jamie Borgan, who know how to nurture kindred spirits and who inspire others by living out a commitment to their ideals.
If she were sitting here, reading over my shoulder, she would insist that life goes on, that change is good, and that others will fill her shoes and do her work. I’m sure I’d fight back but then she would insist, and I would lose yet another argument with her. But it’s just so much easier to lose an argument when she’s around.
—Tim Connor
Other stories by Jamie Borgan
