ORGANIZING THE COMMUNITY CENTER
be more loyal to the state and nation, if he is loyal to his own Community.
The Community Center aims to induce citizens to recognize their responsibility for the administration of public business, to become active in their own communities, to assit in the improvement of local schools, of politics, of roads, of the general health, and of housing conditions. It is the law of all improvement that you must start from where you are. If a man cannot love his own Community, which he can see, how can he love the whole country, which he cannot see?
The success of the work in any Community depends on the amount of public-mindedness existing there or the possibility of creating it. Those who undertake Community Center work ought to guard against the danger of expecting too much at the start. To develop public-mindedness is a slow and difficult task. It ought never to be forgotten that democracy, like liberty, is not an accomplishment but a growth, not an act but a process.
The fact should be perceived by pioneers in
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