For the last three years, I’ve been the editor in charge of putting together the Observer’s City Guide. As a result, whenever I drive, bike, or walk through a new Ann Arbor neighborhood, I always end up seeing a place that I knew through email, or through the neat, concise descriptions I’ve painstakingly researched, updated, edited, or written. 

It’s a weird thing to love, but man do I love the City Guide. Ann Arbor is a city, with a city’s infinite complexities. You could spend your whole life studying a place like Ann Arbor and still only come out of the experience with more questions. But the City Guide distills it down into these little bite-sized nuggets of information: name, address, phone number, brief description, email, and web address. If only life were that simple! 

So when NEW Center president and CEO Will Jones III introduced himself a few weeks prior at a LeadersConnect gathering, it felt like meeting a minor celebrity. He asked me if I was familiar with what the NEW Center does, and I was like, “broadly, yes!” 

NEW (Nonprofit Enterprise at Work), 1100 N. Main, ste. 100. (734) 998–0160. The 11,000-square-foot NEW Center rents office space to area nonprofits and offers rentable meeting/event space to the community. Offers organizational development consulting, leadership development programs, back-office financial management, and IT services. [email protected], new.org

Good ol’ City Guide, this is completely true in the same way a movie preview is true. But this week, I got to see the full feature film — which is to say, a tour of NEW and a chat with Will. 

He showed me their mailroom and meeting spaces, their chilly stairwell and communal kitchen. And then we sat and had a lovely, sprawling conversation about nonprofits, the privilege of having a job that you believe in, technology, government, the importance of community, and how funny and weird it is that we’re millennials and I guess we’re in positions of authority now? 

I asked him if he had any big projects planned for next year, and he said (I’m paraphrasing here) that in the nonprofit world, there are webinars with thousands of participants from across the country. And every person in the webinar might come away from it with one good idea or new piece of knowledge. But the NEW Center holds workshops that bring together a small group of people from the community. They exchange ideas, but more important than that, they build relationships and trust. These are the threads that, woven together, create community. 

Later on in the week, my husband and I did a date night double feature. On Wednesday, it was Tio’s for dinner and the Michigan Theater for a screening of Warren Miller’s Sno-Ciety. On Friday, it was Doug showing me around U-M’s campus (he’s in the grad program at SEAS), followed by Ashley’s for lunch and the State Theatre for Wake Up Dead Man. On our way to Ashley’s, we had a true U-M experience: a run-in with a fat squirrel on the Diag (not pictured, and I am so sorry). She came right up to us, reared up on her haunches, and then pounded a fist against her chest — “a story for the grandkids,” I told Doug over burgers at Ashley’s.