Barbara McIlvaine Smith retired in 2020 and moved to Kennett Square right before COVID hit. What followed wasn’t the relaxed new chapter she might have pictured. It was two years of near-total isolation, the kind so many of us know a little too well from that season.
What came out of it wasn’t withdrawal. It was action.
Barb is a member of the Kennett Friends Meeting, and she’s one of the people behind Community Rising Kennett Square — a monthly gathering that does something almost radically simple: it creates a space for neighbors to bring their concerns, hopes, and ideas, and just listen to each other. No agenda. No debate. No one trying to win.
Just people, sitting together, paying attention.
Why Listening Is Harder Than It Sounds
On the latest episode of the A Place in the Conversation podcast, Barb talks candidly about how much work real listening actually takes. Most of us, if we’re honest, are already forming our response before the other person has finished a sentence. We’re not receiving what’s being said — we’re preparing our reply.
Barb draws a distinction that’s worth sitting with: the difference between empathy and compassion. Empathy is understanding what someone else is going through. Compassion is doing something about it. One without the other, she suggests, doesn’t move anything forward. You can feel for a neighbor all day long, but until that feeling turns into showing up — a phone call, a chair pulled up next to theirs, a Sunday afternoon set aside — it stays theoretical.
It’s a theme that runs through this ministry’s own history. Finding a place to speak and be heard doesn’t happen by accident. Somebody has to build the room, and somebody has to sit down in it.
Land, Roots, and Neighborhoods
Part of what shaped Barb’s conviction traces back generations. She grew up on land her family has farmed since 1681. That kind of rootedness — centuries of staying put, tending the same ground, knowing the neighbors’ names and their parents’ names before them — gave her a bone-deep sense that community isn’t an abstraction. It’s a place. It’s specific people, specific porches, specific Sunday afternoons.
She believes real change starts at the neighborhood level, not in a headline or a policy debate three states away. It starts when a handful of people decide to stop scrolling past each other and start showing up in the same room.
An Open Invitation
Community Rising Kennett Square meets the third Sunday of each month from 2 to 4 p.m. at Kennett Friends Meeting, at the corner of West Sickle and Union Street. Everyone is welcome — no membership required, no agenda to sign onto. Just a chair, and a willingness to listen.
It’s a small, unglamorous thing. A circle of chairs in a meeting house. And yet it’s exactly the kind of quiet infrastructure that restoration is built on — one conversation, one Sunday afternoon, one person who finally feels heard, at a time.
If you’ve been circling the idea of starting something like this in your own neighborhood, or you’re simply craving a space where you can speak honestly and be listened to without an agenda, this episode is worth your time. Take a listen, and if you’re local to Kennett Square, consider pulling up a chair yourself. And if a season of conflict or disconnection in your own community has you looking for a next step, our Design a Peacemaking Plan resources are here whenever you’re ready.
Listen to the full episode, “Building Trust One Conversation at a Time,” on the APITC Podcast.