When To Build A Homestead Community And When To Walk Away

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Homestead Education Podcast. Did you miss me? Because I’ll tell you what I miss connecting with everyone through this podcast for sure. Now, as I talked about in my last episode, we were headed out on what was supposed to be a couple week RV road trip to the Homesteaders of America conference, along with some awesome sightseeing. Well, this trip turned out to be something from the National Lampoon Series right from the get go and was confirmed when we broke down in someone’s yard for a week in rural South Carolina. I’d love to say that I used the time to come up with all sorts of amazing content for you guys, but that would just be a lie. It was such a hard trip and, but I did come up with some great ideas and I’m excited to share them with you soon.

We did get to make some fun memories as a family. We took the kids to Mount Rushmore Bear Country, little Bighorn Devil’s Tower, the Badlands Gettysburg, the Blue Ridge Mountains, Nashville, St. Louis, Kansas City, Independence at the start of the Oregon Trail, the Cabela’s headquarters, Joe Winger Soda Fountain, the Grey Rutts, which is the middle of the Oregon Trail, Cody, Wyoming, Yellowstone, and so many beautiful places along the way. I did a few Instagram reels, so head over there and check ’em out. And I hope to do a few more belated ones as I find some free time. So while we were at the Homesteaders of America’s conference, I have to tell you I was both excited and humbled by how many people already knew me or my products and were excited to have us there. I made some great new friends and I also made some connections that are gonna change so much about my business for the positive.

I’ll share each of these new announcements as they’re confirmed. Unfortunately, I just can’t say anything for sure yet. I also can’t give you very many reviews of the great speakers that were at the Homesteaders of America conference because I was so busy in my booth. But I loved getting to know each and every one of you that came to say hi. It was such a great experience. Some of the announcements that I have for my business include that I will be exhibiting and speaking at multiple events this year, both homestead and homeschool conferences. Each one of the conferences as they’re confirmed, I’ll be adding ’em to a calendar on my website. I don’t have that up yet, so keep an eye out for that. It’s gonna be really exciting and it’s gonna be an opportunity to meet so many more of you. I met some really awesome people at the conference though, and some of them will be coming on my podcast soon and I’ll be a guest on some really amazing podcasts as well. So excited to share those with you. And, but the part that I am most excited for

Is the vision for my future books and an excuse to buy about $500 worth of reference books that were all waiting on my doorstep when I got home from the trip. I know I’m a total nerd, but this made a lot of sense to me, when, so I’m reading this book called Winning and there’s a quote in there from Tom Brady and it says, which of your Super Bowl rings is your favorite? And his response was “the next one.” I get so excited to plan and execute my next big thing. Alright, so after spending almost a month in the motor home with my family, I decided to offer you guys a great deal on a family set of my curriculum. This includes the preschool coloring book, the little learners for your Grammar School kids, and the newest, middle and high school set for a permanent price of 10% off retail. This also includes the digital set as well.

In addition, for a limited time, you can also get additional texts and workbooks to go with the set for another 10% off using code Family. You can see the link for that in the show notes. Oh, onto now onto my main topic for the week, which is community. So what is community? Community can be a lot of things. It can be your geographical area, it can be the people that you associate with. It could be your town, it could be your church. It’s what you find most important in cultivating. And why is community important? People are social creatures. So I mean, if we wanna get into a sociological path on that, I’m not really going there, but we are social creatures and we biologically have a need to almost have like a pack or a herd. In addition to this, your community is who is influencing your children. It’s who’s there for you when your cows get out. It’s who’s helping you teach and grow. Who is there for you when someone in your family is sick and who’s there for the rest of the community that’s supporting the people that you include as part of yours?

So I wrote this podcast months ago, and this is when we were dealing with a lot of wildfires locally. My husband was gone on a fire. A lot of people that I really care about were affected by the fires. And as a community, we really came together to, you know, feed the guys on the line, check in on each other, evacuate animals, networking to know, you know, who had horse trailers and you just who could do what for our community. Because of that, it made me think about community a lot and possibly even idolizing it a little through rose colored glasses. But I’m gonna elaborate on that a little bit more in a minute. 

I’m not saying community’s bad ’cause obviously I’m here to promote community right now, but I need to take a little side note for a second to tell you and ask you and give permission to cut out toxic people in your community. I mean, I just wanna give you a heads up that small town cliques never change. True toxic people never change. And abusive people often won’t go get the help that they need to change. So let me say to you, you don’t still have to be best friends with someone you grew up with who puts you down or doesn’t believe in you. You don’t have to live in the small town you grew up in to benefit from the beauty of small town life, and you don’t have to let a toxic community feed your biggest insecurities. 

I’m sure you’re trying to figure out what I’m talking about thinking, but I thought you loved small town Scottie. I do a hundred percent. I wouldn’t live anywhere else. I wouldn’t be a part of anything else. But that does not mean that you have to be abused by those small towns. Some of them are great and really uplifting but some of them, the culture that you allow yourself to be sucked into or still be a part of, even sometimes they are great people, but they aren’t healthy for you. And that’s okay. Well, it’s not okay that they aren’t healthy for you. It’s okay for you to recognize that this is all coming from a very long backstory, that I may or may not share with you one day, that really everything came rushing back to me during our trip. And there’s a whole thing to that. But let me say if you’re in a toxic situation, leave.

If you have an abusive spouse, a negative friend, unhealthy family, I mean, you can even separate yourself from these situations mentally, even if physically is not an option. I say this because after being put back into a toxic situation recently, I was reminded how much of my growth in life came to me after freeing myself from a toxic situation. So please feel free to reach out to me hello@thehomesteadeducation.com. I’m not a therapist, but I might have a trick in my back pocket to help you grow. And that growth is the biggest thing. I mean, if you’re in an abusive situation and you need help finding the right avenues to leave that, I might be able to help you. Like I said, I’m not a therapist, I’m not a community outreach person, but I’ve been there and maybe sometimes, it just helps to have somebody else say that it’s gonna be okay. All right. I will always teach and preach community. I just never want anyone to feel like they have to force a community that isn’t interested in positive growth for both you and themselves. 

All right, let’s talk about something happier. How to build your positive community. When I say this, I’m not just referring to the standard description of your physical community. I’m also talking about your growth, safety, and information community. These are the people and organizations that you invest your time, energy, both physically and emotionally, and your money into.

This community is the one that helps in an emergency. It teaches each other and is there for you. So how do you build this community? Especially if you’re moving to a small town or a new small town, like I just kind of suggested to some of you to do, start with the mainstream community sources. This is your kids’ school. If they go to school or co-ops with your homeschools sports teams or clubs that your kids are a part of. That’s a really great way for your kids to make friends. It’s a really great way for you to meet some other parents that, you know, also deem sports important. Church is always a great way to build a community. Just, you know, also make sure that you’re not part of a toxic church. 

Maybe I’m harping too hard on that this week, but I mean, like I said, I had my rose colored glasses on about community when we left for our trip. And like I said, I got put back into a situation that was like reliving everything toxic that I had grown up with. And being able to leave that situation again, it reminded me of how great it felt to leave that situation in the first place. And I, I just remember how hard it was and that I kind of wish I had someone from the outside, like when I left, like from the outside pulling me to something more positive when I left, I had to do it on my own. I had to leave a lot behind that I didn’t want to at the time. Now that I look back on it, it was the best thing I’ve ever done. 

So now there’s alternatives for finding community, ones where you kind of have to put yourself out there to get a little bit more involved. Not just sign your kid up for a sport and show up and sit on the sidelines and, you know, hope you see another mom with a wild toddler that you can be like, Hey, I have a wild toddler too. You wanna talk about ’em. This is where you kind of have to put yourself out there a little bit more. And these are my get involved ones. So there’s things like the volunteer fire departments, they are always looking for help. I mean, especially the really rural ones that don’t get any type of funding and can’t pay their firefighters, they just can’t keep good solid people there. Ladies Auxiliaries but a lot of ’em, there’s men that run the auxiliaries too. And these are subgroups of two things like the fire department or the VFW, the Veteran Foreign Wars or other communities like that. That one group is the one out there doing the firefighting. But the firefighters shouldn’t have to raise their own money to be able to have the equipment that they need to also fight the fires. I mean, they’re, they’re doing the hard work. So there’s other groups like the Ladies Auxiliary that will do all the fundraising and plan all the events and order the things that the guys need and, you know, through their social media. And I say the guys, there’s a lot of women on our volunteer fire department here. Just because my husband’s on it, I always say the guys and my son. 

So 4-H, I mean, that’s where you sign your kids up and kind of go. But as parents, we really need to be involved in what’s happening in 4-H and you get a lot of opportunities for that. Another one is to put yourself out there and check on your neighbors. I live in a community where there is a lot of farmers and as the kids grew up and moved off the farms, they were leaving a lot of elderly parents who, at the time were still okay to live alone, or you know, had their spouse or still work the farm. And at this point are, you know, very elderly. And you know, my husband’s kinda like, there’s an elderly woman like that in our neighborhood that he met on a fire call and he checks on her regularly and makes sure she has what she needs and has even taken her to a few doctor’s appointments. She was sick when we left and we knew that. But when we got back from our trip, we found out she’d passed away and that kinda just bothered him that, maybe if he would’ve been here, he could’ve got her to the doctor sooner or something. It’s not the case and I have to remind him of that because she was very ill when we left. 

Sometimes people, you know, we’re living in a really rural community outside of our kind of core town in our county, a lot of times we think of our community as just what’s happening in town. And we have to remember that we live in a small sub-community that has a lot of elderly people and a lot of new people that have moved in. So there’s not necessarily that community of checking on each other and just having that like sub when we don’t have a church up here, we don’t have a school up here, it’s just kind of a residential community with like one small business. And so it’s really important for us to cultivate that community.

Another one is, if you’re interested in survivalism and other things like that. There are a lot of groups and areas. One of ’em that’s really big around here is ham radios. These are radios that will work even if other systems go down. I don’t know all the details on it, but I think they’re a really positive thing that my husband has more information on. I know a lot of the Seventh Day Adventist church of Latter Day Saints- survivalism and preparedness is really big for them. And our local community offers ham radio classes and food preserving classes. They’re open to the community, not just church members. So that’s something to really look into. Now for me, the community that I’m building, of course all of the things I just listed are things that we are a part of plus more, but there’s also kind of a bigger community out there.

So one of the communities that I build is my customers and colleagues. Now, when I say customers, I’m not just speaking to somebody who orders one of my books, although I hope that anybody who’s teaching their kids my curriculum feels like I’m a part of their community because I am. They’re allowing me to teach their child in a way, and I hope that they can keep open communication with me on questions and those types of things. But I’m also talking about some of the customers that I have. Like on my farm I sell about 150 piglets a year as well as whole hogs and retail cuts of meat. And I really hope that education, I always offer education. You know, if you don’t know how to raise a piglet, call me. Ask me. If you buy a whole hog and you get a cut of meat that you don’t know how to cook, call me.

My dad was a pig hunting guide and it was always wild pig that tasted horrible. And so I know 10,000 ways to cook pork that tastes good, or at least, I mean, with the wild stuff at least tastes edible. Now that I’m raising my own hogs that have some, I mean, everybody loves the flavor of our meat. It’s almost red like a beef steak. It’s just amazing. So much flavor. But some of the cuts, they do taste a little different from what you’d expect at the store. And I like to be able to teach people how to cook this meat and not to waste this amazing product. I just always encourage any of my customers to keep me as part of their community. Now, as far as my colleagues, my colleagues aren’t necessarily local. I mean, I do real estate, so I have other agents I work with and yeah, they’re part of my community.

I have other pig farmers in the area. There’s not enough pig farmers in our community, so we are definitely not in competition. People are begging us for product so we can work together really well to make sure that there is a quality product in our community without trying to undercut each other in those types of things. So that’s really awesome where I get to enjoy my colleagues in that sense because when you’re self-employed, you don’t necessarily have colleagues. And so creating your own is a really great network for building your own business and building your community in that sense. I have my business networks. One of my best friends is also kind of my business coach and she’s amazing and she introduces me to so many wonderful other business people where my focus is the homesteading and the kids and the farm.

And I have to really focus on those to even be able to have good quality content creation, which is my business, is the content creation where hers is business integrations and business networking. On the flip side of that, she does homesteading and is newer to that concept and I’m helping them put together their compost operation that they’re doing and helping them get set up with raising their new lambs. And so it’s a really good handoff where we have something to offer each other even though we aren’t in the same field. 

Another one is associations that you believe in. There’s homestead communities, there’s conservation organizations like, you know, Ducks Unlimited and things like that. Find something that you believe in and stand behind it. I mean that’s, you know, our culture is so weird right now and I say that and as soon as I said it, I was like, oh my gosh, they’re imagining me encouraging people to go protest or something. And that’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying find a group that you believe in what they’re doing and go to their meetings and help them fundraise and involve your community with that community.

It’s a positive, I just have to say it’s okay to put yourself out there. I have my moments where I can be very insecure, probably from that wonderful previous toxic situation that I was in. I’m not even gonna go back into the toxic situations. Sometimes they aren’t permanent. But yeah, it’s okay to put yourself out there. You will find your people. 

So where all this sense of community is coming from for me right now, there is a huge realization right now that community sufficiency is just as important as self-sufficiency, maybe even more. I kind of chuckle in a way because as a sub society of modern homesteaders, we have actually come full circle. We have seen that for whatever reason we deem unacceptable. We don’t wanna be a part of the larger community anymore. Our society, our government, whatever that may be. With that, everyone tried to become as self-sufficient as possible and quickly realized that true 100% self-sufficiency, maybe a utopian or a perfectly un-attainable concept without giving up the comforts of modern society and take what you want as to which community comforts are necessary.

We are now in a place where we want and need each member of our individual communities and networks to be able to specialize in tasks that essentially mimics a standard model of modern society on a much smaller scale and with more old fashioned morals and ideologies. I really think this is a positive. I think we’re almost rebuilding what we deem acceptable society and I love it and I hope to see more of it. There’s things we can do on larger scales. I don’t wanna get political, but you know, we have an election coming up. Get out there and vote. You know, obviously I have my own thoughts on this, but you can’t, it doesn’t matter which way you vote. You can’t complain about the outcome if you didn’t do your part. 

So I hope this gave you guys something to think about this week. Something to keep growing. Like I said, if you need a rah rah cheerleader for a minute, feel free and reach out to me. Maybe I can give you more than a railroad cheerleader. ’cause Sometimes I don’t like that. I can give you hope. I’m a busy gal, but I don’t want anyone to feel like they’re stuck. All right, have a great week and hopefully I’ll have a really great guest on for you next week. Keep growing.