The Victoria Sidewalk

There’s a sidewalk in Coventry, Connecticut that wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t been stubborn enough to complain about it.

I grew up in a small town in the far reaches of the state — the kind of place dubbed the “Quiet Corner,” where more cows than people called it home. I’ve only recently come to appreciate those qualities. In high school, they frustrated me.

What frustrated me most was the feeling of being forgotten. Our local, regional, and state government bodies were supposedly there to serve us, but it rarely felt that way. That frustration came to a head one afternoon walking home from softball practice down Main Street. There was no sidewalk. I was either trudging through tall, uncut grass or balancing on a narrow shoulder barely wide enough for my two feet.

The next day I complained to my Civics teacher. She said: “Why complain when you can do something about it?”

I didn’t know you could write to someone with the power to make a change like that. In Civics class, we learned about jury duty, the judicial system, and the three branches of the federal government. We never learned about local government — what our Town Council or State Capitol actually did on a daily basis. So I decided to find out. I wrote a letter to my Town Council asking for a sidewalk to be built down Main Street.

They were so surprised to hear from a high school student that they invited me to speak at their next meeting. Then at a Town Planning and Zoning Committee meeting. I learned the town already knew about the problem and had a plan to fix it — but budget cuts had killed the funding.

Most students would have stopped there. I was too frustrated and too stubborn. I kept writing letters — to every elected official I could find — until my State Representative invited me to Hartford to visit the Capitol. She told me about a federal program called Shovel-Ready Projects, grant money from Obama’s 2009 stimulus package designed to help communities like mine.

I went back to my Town Council and told them to apply. They did.

The government works slowly. I graduated, went to Hofstra to study Political Science, and came home one summer to work at the local market. Driving down Main Street in 2012, I saw construction crews breaking ground. A sidewalk was being built.

My parents called it the Victoria Sidewalk.

I tell this story not because it’s remarkable — it isn’t, really. A teenager wrote some letters and a sidewalk got built. What’s remarkable is how rarely it happens. Most people never write the letter. They assume someone else will, or that it won’t matter, or that the process is too complicated to bother with.

We are living through a moment of real civic disconnection. Americans feel more divided and more cynical than at almost any point in recent memory. We’ve sorted ourselves into communities where we rarely encounter people who see the world differently — and when we do, we don’t always know how to talk to each other.

The antidote is simpler than it sounds: show up. In your town, your neighborhood, your community — with your actual neighbors, including the ones you might disagree with. That’s what The Brickyard is built around. We bring together people from all backgrounds and all perspectives to connect, have honest conversations, and build the kind of trust that makes communities work.

Civic engagement isn’t just voting. It’s writing the letter. It’s showing up to the meeting. It’s deciding that what you have in common with your neighbor matters more than what divides you.

America needs more people willing to do that. Join us at thebrickyard.us.