The Ranger Report #008.2

We’re back! For real. If you’re new here: welcome. We met many of you just a few days ago at the Wheelbarrow Festival. In our little corner of the Lang-Carson basketball court, we kept hearing two questions over and over:

1) How can I contribute?
2) How do I become a Ranger?

The first one we’ll answer now: you can donate to the Reynoldstown Rangers’ biggest project yet, the Museum of Reynoldstown, here.

We’ll devote our October issue to answering the second question, so stay tuned. For now, we want to tell you more about what this Museum of Reynoldstown actually is, and why we’re so excited about it.

Let’s start with the basics:

We’re restoring the store-front glass, capturing the first three feet of the facade,¹ and creating a state-of-the-art display space.
Here we’ll celebrate our community – its people, places, things. They make up our permanent collection, a microcosm of the Urban American South.
Indigenous People to Industrialization. Reconstruction and redlining. White flight and gentrification.
The past, present and future of our city, our region and our shared humanity – they all live in Reynoldstown.

First, we raise – we are raising – $100k.² Next, we build it out. Then, we light it up.
A five-year lease, four shows a year. Phase two, coming next year, will cost a fraction of phase one.³
After twenty shows and five years? We’ll morph and pivot.
As an early friend, you’ll have a front-row seat.

Want to know more? This section is for all of you who are interested in the thing behind the thing:

We’re building a time machine, not a history museum.

Of course we’re interested in the past, the story of how we got here. But we’re just as passionate about the present and the future. Great big stories are hidden up and down our skinny streets. Alongside are small moments worth celebrating – baking biscuits, growing gardens, and piecing quilts – the building blocks of right now. We aspire to fearlessness in confronting our complex possible futures.

Community engagement is our reason for being.

We’re doing this with the community, not for the community, or to the community.
Because we are the community. But MoR is just the tip of the iceberg. Rangers are planting flowers, deepening maps, baking cookies, recording oral histories, leading tours – making neighbors out of strangers. MoR gives this work a highly visible public face; it gives social capital a local address.

How can a building be a bridge?

Our project has no walls – in many ways, it’s the size of an entire neighborhood. If we had a front door, it would open directly onto the Atlanta Beltline. Our visitors inhabit existing public spaces, in the open air. The Museum’s spirit of creative adaptation, our volunteer-centric ethos and modest footprint fit right in. It’s how we build out a dream this big, with a budget this small. It’s how we meet people where they are.

We’re global and local, at the same time.

Are there a thousand neighborhoods like Reynoldstown in the world? Ten thousand? No matter how many, we know we aren’t alone. And our focus isn’t inward and insular. We’re not provincial. Reynoldstown has a lot to teach (and learn from) the world. By looking at the specifics of one place, we see the universal.

Now that you know more, here’s that donation link again.

Next month, look out for a big ol’ list of ways you can Ranger along with us.