Farmington Chamber CEO Turns Community Coffees Into Her First Book

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  My grandmother, she lived to be 103 years old and was a huge influence in my life. And she had a saying, “Don’t agonize, organize.” We all have challenges. Every community has them. We all have days that go differently than we though. Some of the things that happen are pretty tragic in our community and our world. But if we just continue to complain about things and never try to work towards solutions, we just kind of get stuck in that mindset of complaining. So her words of don’t agonize, organize are just about, yes, we can all vent once in a while, but we need to work to organize to move forward. You’re

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  I’m Jamie Church, and my real name is Jameson Church, and I’m the CEO of the Farmington Chamber of Commerce. And I’m also the executive director of the Farmington Chamber Foundation. And I just published my first book, which is called Over a Cup of Coffee: Creating Community: One Cup of Coffee at a Time. It’s my first book, and this is what it looks like. I’ll put it on the camera. I started this book to talk about how I started these focus on Farmington coffees over 10 years ago. Even before I had the job with the chamber, I started these coffees. It’s a once a month community coffee. It’s always free. It’s open to anybody who wants to attend in the community. I move it around to different locations so that we can really highlight all the great things going on in Farmington. And I think what I’ve seen over the 10 years of these coffees is how much community has been built just over people getting together and having a cup of coffee. So they started out with about 10 people or so, and now it’s not unusual that we would have 80 to 100 people at a coffee. And I really spend about three minutes of the time introducing myself and welcoming people. Then I stop talking. It’s about people talking to each other. It’s not about people coming to listen to me or learn about the chamber. It’s about people having conversations together. So I feel the best way for that to happen is if I just step out of the way and let people have their conversations. So I started the book about eight months ago, and it’s really more than just Farmington. This could be used in any community. And I feel really strongly that with social media these days, and we’re just being bombarded all the time with this message of how different we are, how much there are that divides us. There’s so much drama on social media. People say things on social media they would never say when you’re sitting face to face across the table having a real conversation. So the real message of the book is we need to get together for more in-person conversations. We need to get back to doing that and get ourselves away from the screens and the social media and this message that we are more different than we really are. So the book is about the coffees, having conversation, but it’s also about how any community could do this to bring people together in their community. It’s my first book. Could it be Better? Yes. I’m not even sure I would say it’s great, but the message is very relevant and very important. And again, that is we’ve got to put down our screens and our phones. We need to get back to having in-person conversations, and we need to be teaching our youth how to do that too, how to get away from all the stuff that they’re bombarded with and just go have a conversation with somebody. It doesn’t have to be over coffee. Coffee might not be your thing. Go get frozen yogurt with somebody or go get a cup of hot chocolate or go for a walk, but spend time in conversation with people and learn about what you have in common because I think the world is telling us we don’t have a lot in common and actually I think that we do. So that’s the message. The book is, yes, I’m proud of it. It’s my first book, but I think it’s more of the message. And I think the message is really relevant today.

  Thank you for watching this edition of the Local News Network. Over a cup of coffee can be purchased on Amazon as well as from jamesonchurch.com. To learn more, visit gofarmington.com and jamesonchurch.com. And for more stories like this, visit LNN.news.