A community project needs volunteers for the ordinary week after the opening celebration.

Beginnings attract help and middles do not. The launch has a date, a photograph, and a crowd, while the eighteen months of watering, locking up, cleaning and paperwork that follow have none of that, and they are what determines whether the thing still exists in three years. Enthusiasm is easy to gather and hard to keep.

If something local matters to you, offer for an ordinary week rather than the opening. Commit to something small and repeated instead of something impressive and singular. Ask the organizers what nobody wants to do.