Ever wondered what makes a community thrive?
We're wrapping up our first season of "My Hometown," filled with enlightening conversations with the heart of Bowie, Texas - the people, businesses, organizations, and city officials. We highlight the nuances of understanding the individuals behind important titles in the community and how these interactions have shaped our comprehension of this tight-knit neighborhood. If you've missed previous episodes or just want to revisit them, now is the perfect time to immerse yourself in the essence of our community.
Feel the spark of meaningful dialogues and how they can uplift us personally and collectively. Aaron extends an invitation for you to join him in shaping the future of Bowie, Texas. Before we sign off, we express our deepest gratitude to you, our listeners, and encourage you to continue the conversation with Aaron through his website and social media. Stay tuned for an inspiring exploration of the power of conversation, the essence of community, and your significant role in it!
Music by: Kim Cantwell
Bowie Mural: Located at Creative Cakes
Connect w/Aaron: www.aarondegler.com
Ever wondered what makes a community thrive?
We're wrapping up our first season of "My Hometown," filled with enlightening conversations with the heart of Bowie, Texas - the people, businesses, organizations, and city officials. We highlight the nuances of understanding the individuals behind important titles in the community and how these interactions have shaped our comprehension of this tight-knit neighborhood. If you've missed previous episodes or just want to revisit them, now is the perfect time to immerse yourself in the essence of our community.
Feel the spark of meaningful dialogues and how they can uplift us personally and collectively. Aaron extends an invitation for you to join him in shaping the future of Bowie, Texas. Before we sign off, we express our deepest gratitude to you, our listeners, and encourage you to continue the conversation with Aaron through his website and social media. Stay tuned for an inspiring exploration of the power of conversation, the essence of community, and your significant role in it!
Music by: Kim Cantwell
Bowie Mural: Located at Creative Cakes
Connect w/Aaron: www.aarondegler.com
What happened to my hometown. It seemed so different. When I look around, it's funny how things have changed since I was young. What I wouldn't give to go way back and take a long look into my past. I remember this town the way that it used to be. Welcome to my hometown, our little town on the map and home to the world's largest Jim Bowie. Knife. To show you around our beautiful town is our tour guide, erin Degler. Erin has a love for road trips, taking the opportunity to stop along the way in small towns across the US, just like our very own, bowie, texas. Spend a little time with Erin each week as he takes you around Bowie, sharing the value of the small businesses, the organizations, the history and, of course, the people that make up my hometown. After this podcast is over, make sure you give it a like, a share, and please subscribe and review this podcast. I would now like to introduce to you your tour guide for today in my hometown, erin Degler.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to my hometown. Thanks for taking a little time to join me. Today we are wrapping up 2023, the first season of my hometown, my hometown. Our first episode came out the end of January and we're just wrapping up the season of 2023 and quite an exciting year for my hometown. We've had a lot of great conversations we've had over the last year.
Speaker 2:My hometown was started because I wanted to share our community, share the heart of our community with those within our community, but also those coming into our community to understand about what makes up Bowie, what is so special about our town? And it's the people in it. So many times I ask our guests why is Bowie special to you? Why do you call it my hometown? And over and over again, my guests say the people in it. And because of the people in it. I wanted to share the people in it.
Speaker 2:So I've had great conversations with city officials, with business owners, with different organizations just some wonderful conversations about not only because I think it's important that we learn about the business, we learn about the city government, we learn about the organization, but it's also just as important that we learn about the people behind those small businesses that are leading our city government that are in charge of the organizations in our community and what kind of impact those organizations have. Because we might see mayor, chief business owner, organization coordinator, director. We see all those titles and those titles, you know, superintendent. We see those titles and we just think of it sometimes as a title and we forget, I think, that there is a person behind every title. There is a small business owner behind the name of their business that sometimes is struggling just to make the business to keep going. They're struggling with the decision of should I close up shop, should I shut the doors or should I stick it out another week, should I stick it out another month? We don't see those decisions and those thoughts that go on in the small business owner's mind and that was part of the goal. That was really the idea that all started.
Speaker 2:My hometown is because I wanted people to get to know the business owners and know their heart and know that there are struggles that go on behind those closed doors and that in our community those small business owners count on the community to spend those dollars with them. I wanted people to understand that behind the title Mayor, chief of Police that those are people that live here, they have grown up here, they have stories about our community, they have a heart for our community. It's just not, you know, so many times we may disagree with things and we're just quick to disagree with, sometimes just the title. But I always encourage and as I spoke with the mayor and the chief of police it was like they said the same thing you know, ask questions If you don't know something, if you're unsure of how something's working. Ask questions because by communication, that is how we make our community even better.
Speaker 2:Our organizations we have so many wonderful organizations, our community, and over this year I've had so many different conversations but there are still so many more to be had. I'm excited about 2024. I'm excited about the conversations yet to have. But these organizations do so much for our community and are vital to our community, from God's table to the Pregnancy Resource Center, to so many different organizations that we have that. And it's great for me because not only do I get to share those different organizations and we've had many more but I also get to learn. This is a process of almost a little selfishness, because through the show through my hometown, I get to share the goodness of our community but at the same time, I get to learn more about the goodness of our community. I get to fully understand the impact that the people and the organizations have on our community and it has been just a wonderful year for me to sit down and have those conversations and learn about not only learn about all those different organizations, businesses, city government but to learn about the people, to learn about their story. What's their passion? Why did they start this business? Why did they get into city government? Why are they choosing to volunteer their time for this organization? What is so dear to their heart that they're willing to volunteer their precious time for this organization? That, in turn, gives back to our community.
Speaker 2:I encourage you, if you haven't taken the time, to listen to all of those that I've interviewed and sat down and had conversations with on my hometown. I encourage you to take some time and listen to those. This is our last show for the year, so we have a few weeks until the next one comes out. We won't have a new one come out until January the first part of January. I encourage you to take time to catch up on those that you've missed. Initially, when we started the year, we were doing putting out whenever year and, quite honestly, that got to be kind of a lot, not because I was afraid we're going to run out of conversations to have, but it got a lot to be doing that every week and editing and putting it out Got a lot to do for me, so I decided to start doing every other week putting out our show. And again, there are so many more conversations I want to have and I'm looking forward to having 2024. And it's going to just help us to understand even more so the community we live in.
Speaker 2:I think sometimes we take our community for granted because sometimes some of us have always lived here and this is what we always know and we don't know that it's different. Outside of our city limits the world is a little bit different. Sure, we see it on the news and we hear about those things, but we always say, well, those happen in other places, they don't happen here in Bowie, texas, and that's good. But we also need to be aware that those things do happen in other small communities and we're very fortunate, we're very blessed to live in the community that we do, and it takes all of us to create the community that we live in and it's just like one big family that we kind of argue, we kind of get irritated at each other, but in the end just like a big family. We all want what's best for the family and sometimes we just each express it in our own ways. And part of being a family is understanding how others express themselves in the family. And that's the way we are here in our community is. We just express ourselves, sometimes a little bit different, but we all need to be.
Speaker 2:The best way to get across is to open our ears and listen and communicate. There are times when we need to speak, but so many more times there's times when we need to listen. We need to listen to what others are saying and have those conversations and in turn, as we listen, so others listen. So I encourage you to get caught up on all the episodes of my Hometown if you haven't been keeping up with this each with each episode. And I encourage you to support your small businesses. They rely on your dollars. They're not, they're not getting them from other places outside our community. Our small businesses are in business because of each person in our community taking that time to go spend their dollars with our community. And when they do that. Sure, our businesses are sometimes a little bit more expensive than others, but when you go in, they're going to know your name, they're going to help you solve your problem. You don't have to go online and type it in and wait for somebody to chat with you. A live person is going to greet you, meet you and help you solve your problem and if they can't, they're going to point you in the direction within our community that can solve your problem. So I encourage you to go spend some time and money with those small businesses.
Speaker 2:Now, when it comes to our city government, I encourage you to open the lines of communication. Just because something is said or something is written, we may not always know what's behind that or the tone of that. So I encourage each of us in our community to take the time to reach out and share your concerns and find out the information you want. Instead of hearsay, go directly to that source and get the information you want. Communication is so important when it comes to our city government and our citizens so important. So I encourage you to take that step and open those lines of communication. And our organizations. I encourage you to find out about our great organizations, organizations that we can donate our time or money to, and sometimes even organizations that we can utilize. We can utilize the services of some of those organizations or we can direct some of our community members to utilize those services that are offered. We have so many wonderful services and organizations in our community that benefit a wide variety of our community and we can plug in somewhere.
Speaker 2:And you know, one of the greatest pieces of advice when I have on my other podcast, the Mind Body Project, was from Dr Arne Anderson. He was a former owner of Cross Timbers and I asked him about what a successful life looks like and he told me and I use this all the time he said leave it better than you found it. And I encourage each of us in our community to leave it a little better than we found it. That may be with an interaction, that may be with some words we write, that might be with a smile, that might be with letting somebody pull out in front of you. Leave it better than you found it. It sounds so simple, but it can be very challenging on a day to day basis. So I challenge each one of us in our community each day.
Speaker 2:Each time we go out into our community. We have an encounter, whatever it is say how can I leave this, leave my community, leave the people in my community, leave the space in my community a little bit better than I found it? And I hope this year, by sharing all of the different conversations I've had this year, that I have left each of those individuals a little better than I found them by sharing their story. And I hope that, as each one of you found my hometown over this year, that when we got done our conversations, we left you a little better than we found you. So I'm looking forward to a wonderful 2024 with a lot of great conversations. So tune in to 2024, tune into my hometown in 2024, because you don't want to miss any of those great conversations that we have coming up, because it'll leave you a little bit better than we found you. Have a wonderful rest of the year, have a wonderful new year and we'll see each of you in 2024. And I appreciate you stopping by. We'll see you around my hometown.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to today's podcast. If you would like to connect with Erin, you can do so by going to erendeglercom or find him on social media as Erin Degler on Instagram, facebook and YouTube. Once again, we greatly appreciate you tuning in. If you have enjoyed this show, please feel free to rate, subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcast. We greatly appreciate that effort and we will see you around in my hometown.