Walworth residents attend a Board of Supervisors meeting to campaign for expanded transportation serives in the county. From left to right, Father Pedro, Wilma Zomer-Kooiman, Annette & Kevon Gunyon, Sherryl Engstrom. Photo used with permission from the Groundswell Collective Facebook page.
“The state of Wisconsin says I shouldn’t drive, and, honestly, I agree with them!” laughs Kevon Gunyon, who is partially blind. His voice is soft and kind; his humility apparent.
Kevon works at an oven factory in East Troy, Wisconsin. To get there from his home in Elkhorn he travels the 22 miles or so back and forth with VIP Transportation, a county contracted van service providing rides to residents who aren’t able to drive. “Without VIP,” he says, “I wouldn’t be able to work.”
Walworth County is big and rural. To cross the county from Sharon to Potter Lake can take nearly an hour and you pass through small towns, crossroads, and rolling farmland. It’s beautiful here, which is why wealthy vacationers flock to the shores of Lake Geneva for boating, golfing, and spas. But for people like Kevon who has lived here since he was in his 20s, living can be hard.
“It’s a very car-centric place to be,” says Kevon. He lives near downtown Elkhorn, a town of just over 10,000 residents, which puts him within walking distance of a Speedway gas station, a Subway sandwich shop, and the few blocks of antique stores and local restaurants that surround the county administration buildings. To get to a grocery store, however, Kevon says he’d need to walk more than a mile round trip. He could do that, sure— but not with bags of groceries in tow.
When Kevon rides the VIP van, he’s often riding with another commuter who needs to be dropped off north of East Troy first before it heads back south to Elkhorn. He also rides with a number of senior citizens who are using the service to get to medical appointments and some teenagers who are attending an alternative high school.
Open Arms Free Clinic in Walworth County, WI. Photo provided by Sara Nichols.
In these ways, the van service– which costs a few dollars per ride– is successfully connecting Walworth residents to essential services. It could even be saving lives. Sara Nichols, who runs Open Arms Free Clinic in Elkhorn, says that for people to get the care they need– dental services, medications, mental health care– transportation support is essential. For poor and working-class people in the county, especially those living in small communities like Darien or Lauderdale Lake, even the cost of driving from place to place can be prohibitive. “These are long country roads,” she says. “Places are spread out and gas isn’t cheap.”
During the pandemic, Sara seized the opportunity to bring an Uber Health pilot project to Walworth County, providing non-emergency medical transportation. “I didn’t even know if we had any Uber drivers in Walworth County,” she laughs, “But it turns out we have two!” The project has been providing about 200 rides a month, but it ends this spring. “I don’t think that working with a for-profit company is the solution, but what the program did do is show how big the need is. We knew there was a problem, but we weren’t able to demonstrate it before.” She’s now talking to churches to pass the collection plate to continue the program in some form.
For Sara, connecting people to essential services is just one need. “People have other needs, things that aren’t as easily described as an appointment. People need to be able to get to each other.”
“There’s a real need for connection here,” says Tom De Groot, the pastor of St. John’s, a Elkhorn congregation that has existed since 1898. “People are lonely. They want to see their families, to participate in civic life together.” At St. John’s Tom sees parishioners offer each other rides, especially to make sure their neighbors can get to church.
“The county is divided along a lot of lines that make people feel isolated. Part of it is living out in the county or being alone at home, unable to move about easily. But that isolation is heightened when we are also segregated along lines of poverty. We are increasingly a bedroom community to Milwaukee and a vacation destination for Chicago. Many people who live here literally don’t know what it's like for their own neighbors to live here.”
“Transportation is a public health concern, not just a logistical concern,” says Sara. “Isolation can hide a critical health condition. If someone with high blood pressure doesn’t have someone to talk to or who knows them to recognize a change in speech, walking, or just focus, a major cardiac event is at higher risk.”
“What I know is that in Walworth County the incidence of heart disease is three times higher than other Wisconsin Counties. Is that the isolation? The poverty? I don’t know– but something is happening here that needs to be fixed.”
Fight Isolation, Win Transportation
The VIP vans didn’t operate on Sundays; perhaps the rationale was that the local medical and government offices were all closed that day.
But it’s on the weekends that Kevon, a woodworker, goes to his garage shop to tinker and create. “Sometimes I run out of something– maybe wood glue– and I need to get more but I can’t just pop out and get some.”
“I know that's not the end of the world, but it makes things hard. I have to call a friend to give me a ride and then I feel like a burden. For me,transportation is about freedom. You feel stuck in a way that maybe others don’t. I want people to be able to get out and run to the store or meet up with friends.”
So, when Kevon’s wife saw that a group of local residents was going to the County Board to ask for Sundays to be added to the VIP schedule, he was all in. “After checking into it, they said all I had to do was come to the council meeting and speak for a few minutes. I said, ‘Okay, if it will help, I guess I can.”
It did help.
Kevon Gunyon was one of the many local residents who shared their personal experiences with living in Walworth County without transportation at a series of Board of Supervisor meetings. Photo used with permssion from the Groundswell Collective Facebook page.
This is how Kevon, Sara, Tom, and a few dozen others went about convincing Walworth County to expand public services, at a time when so many government budgets and services elsewhere are being cut. The group set out to figure out which members of the Board of Supervisors understood the need and which ones needed more information to fully grasp the situation.They poured over the budget and the minutes from the Transportation Committee to find solutions. They figured out when the next board meetings were and how to get on the agenda.
In the end, they each say it was who was there and what they shared that made the difference.
Sara had often been in meetings trying to address community needs, such as transportation, and had felt like participants were “checking boxes.” “What felt different about the Fight Isolation, Win Transportation campaign was that different people were there. People were involved who had never been asked to speak to before, groups in the room that – to my knowledge– had not been included before.”
“It made the difference to have people speaking from their own experiences– just from the heart,” says Tom. “People explained what it was like to feel alone or isolated in Walworth County. For everyone, it became clear this wasn’t just about the VIP buses running on Sundays, but about people saying they wanted to be with their loved ones.”
Family, friends, how we spend our weekends. The conversation in those board meetings was about things that everyone could relate to.
Finding an issue like transportation and isolation felt like “fire in the belly” and turned residents across generations out from all over Walworth County. Photo used with permission from the Groundswell Collective Facebook page.
“There was a way that we did this so it didn’t feel political or contentious,” explains Kevon. “Sure they have the parliamentary rules, but besides that we were just explaining our lives and what was and wasn’t working. I realized that the people on the board were just my neighbors, not guys in three piece suits or highfalutin. We could talk to them about what we needed in genuine ways, and they could understand.”
Even though it hadn’t been included in their original county budget, the Board of Supervisors voted to expand the transportation services. The buses are now running on Sundays– for church, for woodglue, for connectivity.
“It was a rare moment in politics that we had the power and the opportunity to do something together and for each other,” says Tom.
Groundswell
The people of Walworth County realized they were on to something. Winning the Sunday transportation campaign showed them that change was possible and that they could influence and work with their local government.
Sara believes this is because they found an issue that resonated with so many people– it felt like “fire in the belly.” She learned that people really do want to be involved in their local community and be a part of decisions.
“To bring people together, to work together, to fight isolation, we need glue– one sticky piece,’ she says. “Something that activates people and invigorates us to work together.” She sees community organizing, like the transportation campaign, as that sticky piece.
This winter, the emerging group committed to keep working together. They voted on a name: The Groundswell Collective. Now that they’ve felt the power they can have, they are looking for more opportunities to organize and win things that poor and working people in Walworth County need.
“The division we’re all experiencing feels hopeless to so many right now,” says Tom of the political climate in our country. “Our government is often perceived more as a problem than a solution. But we have shown that, at least in Walworth County, that doesn’t have to be the case– not if we go in looking for solutions. The glimmer of hope we have is that we now know we can make a difference in our own neighborhood– and we know that we are needed here.”
“What we did right,” agrees Kevon, “Is that we didn't make it a right or wrong thing or an us versus them thing. We made it a ‘how-are-we-going-to-make-this-work thing.’ That’s what we did right in Walworth County.”
Pastor Tom De Groot of St. John's Church in Elkhorn and Kathy next to the VIP Services Wal-to Wal van, now running on Sundays. Photo used with permission from the Groundswell Collective Facebook page.
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this was really really good! thank you for the work that you do.