by: Maria Young, NEK Leadership Institute Director
Jim Currier welcomed the NEK Leadership Institute to Glover last Saturday. In this clip, he shares about when he found a bike off the side of the road, reported it to the State Police but no one claimed it, and then decided it needed to be displayed – high above the gas tanks of his family’s store, Currier’s Market,  where a neighbor offered to weld it for him. He says it’s due now for some orange spray paint, but he’ll probably wait until nicer weather for that. It’s a beacon – much like Currier’s Market has been – for locals and visitors traveling Route 16. We found out it took Jim 4 years to pay off the bill at the taxidermists for the moose that greets customers between the fishing gear and toilet paper. He burns all wood to heat the store, and he’s on the third generation in the same family that delivers his firewood. He’s owned Currier’s Market for 53 years, and still gets there by 5 am to sort bottles and cans for redemption. For many years, Jim ran and biked, epic distances around the NEK, but after he completed a century run, he put down his running shoes and picked up a guitar. You can hear Jim play now at jam sessions in Glover weekly – he also visits the local nursing homes to play. Jim talked about hard work, and how he’d always had that way about him – from his first job at 13 at the A&P in Newport.
The second session of the NEK Leadership Institute explored the building blocks of vibrant communities (building blocks like Jim), and the Glover Town Hall was a perfect setting to contemplate this. Prior to the session, participants read Wallace Stegner’s short essay Sense of Place. “No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments,” wrote Stegner. Jim’s welcome made Glover become a place – or more of a place, for a few of us. For me and Leadership Institute member Leanne Harple, the Town Hall was our school gym and our concert venue – a 5 minute walk down from the school and longer back up again, before Glover School got its own gym.

New stories add new layers, accessible for both locals and newcomers who share a curiosity about the history of a place, and its future. This curiosity marked the passion of NVU professor, author and historian Paul Searls who  posed an interesting question to the group:What are we more afraid of in the NEK – too much growth, or not enough? He shared a historian’s view of patterns of settlement, loss of farms, racism and acceptance, young and old, more of them leaving then returning – the stories of our NEK communities. The NEK has the chance to do it right, he suggested. There is hope here.
The cohort walked a block down main street to Red Sky Trading, where proprietors Doug and Cherie Safford, provided a meal that amazed and delighted everyone.  More than this, Cherie’s passion for building community through food inspired each of us, and particularly Leadership Institute member Heidi Myers, co-founder of the Rasputitsa Gravel Race, to add Cherie’s legendary donuts to the race course this year – paired with maple syrup shots from glasses made of ice. Following lunch, Gwen Bailey-Rowe of North Country Career Center explored leadership styles with the group, inviting self-reflection, as we considered the qualities we aspire to in leadership, and how we can model those on our mentors.
To complete the day, Tina Ghantous created space to pause, stretch, share, and think in a new way about self care, wellness, and mindfulness – sustaining our selves as a way to ensure we can be there to sustain others. Tina presented the wheel of circadian rhythms which guide some cultures – by day, by year, by life, as the sun went down on a Saturday well spent .