 Well, it's 8 p.m. on Friday night, and we're back here at Byline, a public affairs show cosponsored by the Amherst League of Women Voters and Amherst Media. And if you wish to see the show again, you can see it again on Monday evening at 6 p.m. And it shows about 30 minutes before the town council meets when they're meeting on that particular evening. But we're on every Friday night and every Monday night. And if you can't get enough of us, you can also find us on Amherst Media's website and also on their YouTube channel. So this show is all about helping us get to know and understand more about our newly elected representatives at our town council and down Beacon Hill. And tonight, our guest is Pat DeAngelis, who is a district counselor from District 2. And Pat is a really interesting person with an amazingly interesting background. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about it, and then I'm going to throw the ball to her. But Pat is a former dancer, and former activist, you know, you're never a former activist, an activist, a former teacher. And she got her college degree at age 50 and stepped into the classroom as a professional teacher for the first time a year later. So wow, you have quite a background. Welcome. Thank you, sir. It's really great to have you here this evening. And what an eclectic background. So with all of that experience, what are you bringing to the town council table? You've got experience, you've got skills. I feel like what I'm bringing is empathy. And I've been thinking about that. What I'm bringing is a real intention to listen and deal with people and deal with the issues that actually impact them. And finding ways to bring their voices into the process of representation and the process of deciding, really deciding things in Amherst, not, yeah, so I think that. So that's number one. All right. Some other skills. All right. Yeah. We know that there's more to you than that. Well I've been, as a teacher, I got involved with summer math for teachers at Mount Holyoke. And it was a process of transforming my own practice. And eventually that led me to facilitating for them and then a job in Boston working with teachers facilitating their practice. So what I have a lot of experience doing is taking people who don't want to change, who are only in one position and being able to facilitate their process and being able to find the openings where they're maybe ready to look and make a change. And I think that's a very important skill. I also feel like I got involved with town meeting because I worked with Amherst Sanctuary to create the Sanctuary By-law. And that process was really fascinating for me to actually create a law and then begin to see how we had to move it through the town. And it eventually led me to town meeting as a member of town meeting. So what else do I bring? I think I bring a willingness to reach consensus and to find collaborative ways to solve things. I did that in the classroom. I did that in the dance world. I did that in my work with teachers and parents. And I feel very strongly that you and I can have completely different opinions and think we're never going to meet. And if we think about consensus or collaborative disputing maybe, then there's this sense of there's something that you're bringing that's important and something that I'm bringing that's important and how can we find those connections. And then hopefully, and this has been my experience in larger groups and social action issues, which is that you create something stronger and better so that my idea, even though I think it's the best, can grow very differently and powerfully. And I'm glad I stumbled for a moment into social activism because that really does it brings skills again in listening and skills in being willing to take risks with what I have to say and who I'm ready to speak with, who I'm willing to let into the process. And finding common ground is something that you see as central to the ability to take your ideas and my ideas and form it into something that would be a third thing. It would not be yours, it would not be mine. It would be ours. It would be ours. Yeah. And that's not a process. We use the majority vote thing. And consensus isn't just, oh, we have to agree. There are all kinds of ways to deal with the issue. But the premise that you're working on something together is, I think, is really basic to making any organization, no matter how small or how large, have the possibility of positive change and growth. You know, there are divisions and embers around all kinds of things. I mean, that's sort of the town that we are in many ways. And so if we could stop seeing them as divides or walls and see them as places of creative tension, I think we'd be a lot better off. That's a great concept, creative tension. I see the dancer in you in that second there when you said that, because that's what you're doing. Right. You're creating, you're taking the music, you're taking body movement, you're bringing those together to create something. And as a dancer, one of the, I moved away from actually using music and created a group called Clearing which was, had actors, dancers, poets in it, and we worked improvisationally. But that improvisation was based on regular practice in the studio, regular knowledge of each other's bodies and the risks we could take. And I think what I see is my part of my work on the council is doing that regular practice of doing the reading, of finding the people I need to talk to, and then taking the leaps that you make when you're listening and arguing and trying to create together. So doing your homework first, then coming to the table with an open mind. With values and positions, speaking your own mind first as part of it, or maybe listening first. But the point is, you state your position, I state my position, and now we've got to find the common ground and bring it together. Right. And I really think that that's critically important. And it's been critically important in my life as a person, let alone any of the professional things I've done. And when you sit at the town council table, most of the decisions are made by a vote. A vote basically is each of the 13 of you saying will you stand on it. Maybe by showing your hands or by saying yes or no to a proposal. But it sounds to me like the part that you're going to like the best is sitting in a committee and working with people to try to find that common ground and build a consensus, create a vision, and then try to shape that and bring it together. So therefore I want to be on every committee. But you can't be on every committee. Nobody can be on every committee, but you still have a voice. But that's going to be interesting to you. How are you going to handle that tension? Because if you will have wanted to be on every committee and you're not on every committee and they come forward with a proposal, how does that work? Well, I think that the job of the committee is to come forward with a proposal. But it's also to convince us that the proposal is accurate. I think I'm going to be attending some of the committee meetings. As an observer. As an observer. I think I'm asking people who I've worked with in the past around political issues to do some of that watching and listening for me. I think one of the things that's different about the Charter-Thin-Town meeting is that we can have a discussion before we vote in the sense of we can postpone the vote. We can't postpone it very long. But the fact is that there is an attempt to really discuss things, not just decide things. That's a very important distinction. Discuss things, not just decide things. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. I mean, because not one of the three, we don't have the best vision. Maybe third to him, people together can create an incredible vision. Division, yeah. And then carry that forward. And speaking of vision and values, it was very impressive to me when you made your opening statement on that first meeting where you elected your leadership, each of you got to make a couple of minute statement. And what jumped out to me was when you said, and I think you almost finished with this line, I want to help create a just and sustainable amour. Right. A diverse and just and sustainable amour. So go with that. Tell us what did you mean by that? And how do we know when we have a diverse, just and sustainable amour? It's, I think for me, the idea of justice or a place that's just is a town or an environment where all people are really and truly welcomed and integrated into the culture. I was once sitting in a workshop on racism as a participant, and they asked me for my vision of Amherst quite a while ago. And I remember talking about something about I wanted people to know poets who were black. I wanted them to know other writers that are black, not just the white classics and things like that. So when I talk about social justice issues, I really mean, how do we create an Amherst where it's safe for anyone to be in the street? And I think we have a really decent police department. And I know that they've been doing some work around, hopefully, restorative justice practices. I would like to see them engage in some training around racial issues and things like that. I see justness in how do we create housing that includes everyone? I mean, the typical way of doing it is if you make lower moderate income housing, it's pushed off here. Even Olympia Place or Olympia is it's beautiful. It's beautiful, but it's all low income. So how do we create living situations where we have a mix of incomes? We have a mix of race. We have a mix of abilities. And since I've lived in that kind of situation, I know how it challenged me, and that's what I hope for us in Amherst, all of us, is to be challenged around our assumptions and beliefs. So that's one thing. In terms of sustainability. And that relates to both justice and diversity? Yes, it does. Yeah, it does. And another thing is? Well, the idea of sustainability, it really means that we have enough to take care of our needs now. But we're also making sure that our future children have what they need. And that's a different attitude than we've had in this country. It means looking at energy sources and all of those things. And it's maybe becoming overused. But maybe a word to replace it with is some kind of resilience in the community. Both in terms of interactions between people and how we develop and what we develop in downtown Amherst to increase the tax base. And what do we look at? And what positions do we honestly take? I don't know. Yeah, and in the December 17th, no, the December 10th meeting, I believe it was, when there was a conversation about the committees, you carried this forward again, which was very interesting to me. You basically started to talk about, you connected economic development and sustainability in that conversation, because you wanted to make sure that by the time all the committees were set up that there was a place where sustainability, because it wasn't in the jurisdiction of any of the three, first four of initial established standing committees. And so it was interesting to me that you took that next step and you linked it and you shifted a little bit. You didn't give up what you said before, but you shifted. No, I didn't. And you joined economic development in the conversation. So how does that work? Well, sustainable economic development really applies the same principle that we create what we need, but we look to the future. So it means using more renewable sources. It means using biodegradable and natural products. It's looking at construction practices that don't endanger the environment. So there are things like that that we can look at economically. And a lot of people start saying, oh, it's going to make everything more expensive. But if we ever take the long-term view and look at what we gain over time, then I think we can make better decisions than we're making. I'm thinking about the way we use space to create housing and everything else. We make these large buildings and there's very little, there's no room for lower moderate-income people in them. But we could be building buildings that were inclusive if you used inclusionary zoning and practices. I was reading an article in The Globe several months ago about housing development created by two architects. It houses nine families, 28 people in 4,500 square feet. And it goes up, but it's built beautifully. It's colorful, the structure is not just this glass. And it's been purposefully designed so that there is a common area on the first floor and that the families can see each other. There's no place in it where you can't see other people so that you have this sense of community. So when we're looking at the buildings we're building, whether or not we like what they look like or not, how are we going to use them to benefit everybody? And do they have to look like that? I mean if you're thinking about nine families on 4,500 square feet, that's a very different kind of development than the sprawl that we're seeing moving into some of the farmland and things around Amherst and in Amherst that are going to change the character in I think in some negative ways and impact us environmentally in terms of water usage and things. Yeah, your excitement about that development that you just described, that reminded me you were involved in co-housing in years gone by. What was that experience? That was five years my wife, well she wasn't my wife then because we couldn't, my partner Carol and our three-year-old son moved into the Pomeroy Lane Cooperative which wasn't specifically co-housing but it was built on a co-housing model. So there was a small community house and there were I think 25 of us, 25 families and we were mixed income, section eight, low income and market rate people. Every color that you could possibly be we were, some of us were lesbian, most people were straight and that became some tension for a little while. We had it also within the master deed required people with physical or cognitive challenges to be included in the development. So again there was this richness of difference and that living situation was phenomenal for me. It challenged a lot of my basic assumptions about who I was and who other people were and that's I think if we want to talk about justice, if we want to talk about changing the culture of this country we really need to find those situations. I'll share one story I think. Sure please. All 25 families moved in at the same time. All at the same time. Yeah. Talk about... Right exactly and it was winter and one family, I don't remember why did not stay very long and they left and their unit was open briefly and their pipes burst and it flooded the courtyard. The units, the townhouses and accessible apartments were built facing a courtyard with parking way over there. Anyway it was complete ice and we had a couple, one and Tori, who both had cerebral palsy, both Paralympic people who'd been traveling around the world and winning medals, bronze and gold medals and they lived at the far end of the community and so they could get there around the back but you really kind of had to go through the middle of the community and I wasn't thinking anything about it and my neighbor William came running over and he said, Pat, Pat you've got to go talk to Juan. He's crawling across the ice and I'm like going oh well we can't have that, we can't have that so I went over to speak to Juan and Tori and I said Juan I found out that you're coming home from work and you're crawling across the ice. I said you don't have to do that. We can figure something out and Tori just and his sister was there too and they started laughing and they just said if Juan wanted help, Juan would ask for help and then Juan looked at me and he said hey Pat when we have the community potlucks don't I ask you to carry my plate because of the way he walked he couldn't do that and so it's a startling lesson so what I said was oh I get it you are perfectly okay crawling across the ice and we've got to get used to looking at it. That's what you decide you have to do. Yeah and if you you know I feel like that that was an amazing lesson for me and I carry it over in terms of when I think about creating housing for people who are potentially homeless. I've always said it should have services in it and I got challenged by Tracy from the survival center and she said no people have a right to live without services and to choose how they live and I heard that echo of that story you know if I need help I'll ask for help and I can do you know. So that brings us back to your your themes earlier about empathy yeah and listening and being open to seeing the other person's point of view or way of wanting to do it and accepting it. Yeah and allowing ourselves to be challenged you know and if we carry that to a larger perspective as a community that does need development to help sustain us and so that our taxes aren't flying everywhere we need that development but what does it need to look like what and that is right now we think restaurants and what would that sustainable development look like. Right what would it look like and and to me it would look like a collaborative or cooperative cold storage system for farmers that's something that they need and I've been talking to Sarah so I don't want to claim it. Okay Sarah Swartz the town councilor. Right and one of the things that I was talking about when I was responding to her in that conversation was my son's one of his roommate Sarah rents space in a certified kitchen in Boston and she's starting a baking company and it gives her the opportunity to make food for farmers markets and also online and she doesn't have to have all this stuff but you know and if we had something like that in Amherst then there are things that people who could be creating small businesses using that collaborative the bank downtown on main street Amherst works yes that was a phenomenal idea they didn't tear down the building so that's sustainable right and what they did was make cooperative workspace so that you know I think those are really good ideas and so what other businesses could we have besides restaurants and things like that what can we do to make Amherst walkable micable blah blah blah in stages that don't impact everybody negatively because right now we are a car oriented society still you know and so what I feel like and the reason I wanted to be on this economic and development and sustainable committee that is now called the committee that shall not be named because we're working on it was to sort of find a way to really research and get understand the impact of decisions because like every other group of people we make this decision and it may be a really good one but we didn't notice what else it was going to affect what yeah and so we intended consequences yeah and how do we anticipate some of those and begin to understand what they are that contributes to sustainability and not just but also community sustainability you know how do we engage people in the not just in the political process but how do we engage people in Amherst and you know we have am I talking too much no this is exactly why you're here you're here for the purpose of helping us understand more about who you are I thank you I was in favor when I was at a meeting of the preferred north common plan I thought the decisions were really good and but it it did have a loss of parking and it kind of made town hall a little bit more important than maybe it should be but I started listening to what other people were saying and some of the consequences of it and then I thought hell where are we going to get the money to do it you know we have schools we have DPW we have these other issues how are we going to do this without increasing taxes so that people are leaving Amherst and I realized why aren't we asking the master gardeners in town to come and volunteer time why aren't we asking elementary through high school students to come and work on revamping the common that's kind of a community engagement that we don't think about it's interesting to me that you are thinking about sustainability in as very broad a way as you are but you're you are really making sure that there is a big focus on its impact on the economy and the economy's impact on sustainability right that's so interesting to me because I think most people when they think about sustainability they only think about the environment right but you can't have one anymore without the other and you're looking at a much broader way of thinking about sustainability which involves the economy it involves it all involves diversity it involves equity yeah it involves justice right there there are you know basic principles are of sustainability if you include the idea of not just environmental sustainability but community or sustainability of communities you've got to look at what's being created for people and a lot of these changes create jobs and create reasons to be here we can bring tourists to Amherst not just because we have fancy plays although that would be nice because we don't much although we have Amherst cinema I know which I love I really love a lot of wonderful stuff right but you can also bring people to Amherst on tour because we have net zero buildings or you know and or you can the bandstand this is yeah and the Hitchcock Center right and that we're requiring in terms of municipal development from and renovation that's right and the other piece is I was looking at some of the library designs and the people's choice award was a bandstand that had a green roof right incredible that wasn't even though it was the people's choice they went back to the traditional where Olmsted had it blah blah blah and that's a mistake in Amherst because if you want to bring people here let's bring them for environmental reasons and then they go to the restaurants and then they find out how good the cinema is you know and things like that well this has been a fascinating conversation and we've we've accomplished our goal here which was to get to understand more about you and how you think about things and what your hopes are as a member of the council so thank you for joining us and thank you for joining us and we look forward to seeing you all again soon