You know you've made it when:

My job is about half community relations. (For those that don't know, I "intern" full time for less than half pay at my church, amongst other strange money making tasks). Which is strange for a 25 year old, I guess. At least for Renton. Maybe in Seattle lots of hip kids work on community development (is she saying she's hip?). But in Renton....there's quite a generational gap with my community colleagues. They like to try and rustle my hair and say things like "it's so great to see young people caring and getting involved with their community". I guess it's kind of cute, really.

I am currently helping to create the first downtown art walk council, as (finally!) Renton has been opening up to becoming a more diverse, art loving community! I'm proud to be helping to usher that in.

At today's meeting in our space, several new under 30's showed up, to my happy surprise. Everyone got to see our new space, and became ecstatic at the possibilities of our project (the HComm.DA project). Through everyone's shared excitement, the stiff barrier wall of "committee" began to crumble a bit, and everyone became much more friendly and personal to each other.

You know you've really made it in the community development world when your friendly new colleagues finally ask you to lunch; "Hey, we got this great tip off from the city to the ribbon cutting going on over at the new Applebees. Wanna come?"