This is a Failed Experiment
I've written repeatedly about the origin story of Eclogiselle. But let's give a recap:
In December 2017, I applied for a community development job in Aberdeen, Washington which had a population of around 16,000 people. I am medically handicapped and don't have a strong work record and unsurprisingly did not get the job.
I didn't expect to get it.
My medical condition predisposes me to insomnia and I had been up all night when I tripped across the job listing and applied on a lark. It's sort of my version of drunk dialing and I was shocked they took my application seriously at all.
A few months after they hired someone else, he and others began suggesting I might yet get the job. It was my dream job and I desperately needed more income, so while I didn't really want a full-time job, I spent my time working on figuring out how I would do it if they actually hired me, while trying to tell them "I'm really wanting like part-time freelance income because of my health situation."
I know a lot about homelessness and Aberdeen had a huge homeless problem. I was developing a mock-up website for the organization in question and concluded that I not only couldn't solve that problem by trying to improve homeless services locally, it would actively make the problem worse by handling it that way.
So while too sick to work a full-time job, I'm fantasizing that:
1. They hire me for a job that's probably not really forty hours in practice and is probably more like sixty.
2. I add a part-time consulting business on top of that to help other small towns in western Washington to try to actually be effective and get the job done.
Which is ridiculous on the face of it.
So I'm researching how to do actual community development in a small town and reading the Main Street America guidelines and going "Yippee! This established organization agrees with some of my ideas like having a style guide for downtown!" And feeling validated.
And I began thinking of Eclogiselle as potentially a stand alone business where the Main Street America program I applied for Executive Director at would hire me to help them with their goals.
The longer this went on, the more I began to believe that the Main Street America program doesn't really work. I wrote a style guide, published it on a website and hoped to mend fences and build bridges and wrote a free language template for them to copy-paste and use my work at zero dollars pay in exchange for promoting my work and crediting me.
Wil Russoul, the man they hired as Executive Director, had previously promptly updated their website anytime I criticized it as a means to use my work for free while pissing all over me with plausible deniability, but, no, my free language template was not promptly copied and pasted. It was never copied and pasted though it explicitly gave them permission to legally use my work without pay.
No, I never saw any evidence that Main Street America was threatening to delist them or whatever for not having ever developed a style guide which they suggest is a "basic" requirement that should be done early. This fact contributes to my belief that Main Street America is a joke and doesn't really work.
I have substantial education and experience pertinent to doing this kind of work and their shocking interest in me suggests that I had a stronger background than anyone else who applied for the job. It took me a long time -- months to years -- to put together a satisfactory website, style guide, color scheme, affordable quality map resources etc.
I became convinced there is a market gap the size of the Grand Canyon in small town and rural planning. There's no money in it, so the vast majority of resources are developed by, for and about big cities.
Someone working at a for-profit planning consultancy told me they didn't take jobs below $5000. I began trying to figure out how to turn Eclogiselle into a planning business offering services to small towns and unincorporated communities and rural areas for less than $5000.
I initially posted maps on Eclogiselle and elsewhere under a Creative Commons license that small towns or businesses in western Washington could use for free if they linked to where they got it and credited me for making it. I hoped it would serve as a sample of my work and a means to get people to promote me.
None of that went anywhere and I eventually left Aberdeen after being illegally evicted. The eviction occurred after I wrote a post about getting grants and then "coincidentally" my landlord magically had money to improve the property.
It seems likely they used my writing to benefit themselves and then intentionally shafted me. I left town.
I worked for a man named Michael Dickerson at a different local community development organization. Somewhere on this site is a link to his obituary.
His organization, Our Aberdeen, did a lot of "beautification" projects. They would get grants from local sources and hire local artists to do murals.
There are lots of studies showing a correlation between prosperity and attractiveness. I've tried to find something saying exactly how that works and I can find absolutely NOTHING that supports the idea "Make it pretty and the money will follow."
Probably, "beautification" helps if it adds live plants, reduces tripping hazards and hygiene issues and provides improved security. I've written about that.
Murals do none of that.
Michael Dickerson was a ghost. I tried to search his name online and found exactly one reference to him. I came to believe he probably was in hiding and most likely had killed someone because murder has no statute of limitations and he had he been there long enough for the statute of limitations to run out on probably anything else.
I came to believe that he was involved in community development to intentionally strangle development of Aberdeen, Washington and preserve his hideout and prevent an influx of new people or events that might attract reporters or the like.
I came to suspect that at least three other people in town active in all the historic development boards and such were similarly bad people with criminal activity in their past who didn't want Aberdeen to develop.
I suspect that, most likely, small town America is withering on the vine because that story is probably not unique to Aberdeen. I think criminals intentionally move to small towns, get on local boards and intentionally strangle development hoping to keep their hideout from growing.
I'm convinced that's the real reason Aberdeen sucks and isn't getting better and small towns tend to have the same dozen people serving on multiple boards and defacto controlling everything.
I believe no one in the US really WANTS meaningful solutions for the problems plaguing small towns and rural communities.
I have absolutely no idea why the posts on this site are getting dozens or more of page views when I am no longer on social media at all and my Patreon only has fifteen members.
I'm desperately trying to wrap up completing the archive and a few other details and figure out how to give my time and attention to something with some hope of paying my bills because this doesn't appear to be anything that will ever pay my bills.
And I believe the reason for that is that people in positions of control in small towns don't want them to grow or improve because a significant percentage of them are criminals in hiding.
I have absolutely no power to fix that. I was treated abusively by people in Aberdeen, Washington and I am not some crusader dogooder type.
I'm a gal trying to earn a living in spite of my medical situation.
So I'm trying to figure out what else to do with my time. Because this is absolutely not solving that problem even if in theory some handful of people somewhere find it moderately useful for their purposes, but not useful enough to support my Patreon or hire me to make them maps or whatever.