Four years ago next month, I testified at a hearing of the state Ways and Means Committee considering closing the OSU-Cascades Campus. I told them that OSU-Cascades meant that I could live where I wanted to and pursue the career that otherwise might take me away from Central Oregon. Because of the hard work and advocacy of the community, OSU-Cascades survived that scare.

Since then, I moved to Washington and received my Master of Arts from Seattle University. I am now a Ph.D. student studying community resources and development at Arizona State University. I continue to monitor OSU-Cascades on a regular basis because my wife and I still hope we can make a life in Central Oregon.

We had to leave to pursue the educational and training opportunities we desired, but fewer and fewer students and families will have to do that with the expansion of OSU-Cascades to a four-year university. And although I dream of global impact with my scholarship and community work, technology means I can do it from anywhere — including Bend.

As a practitioner and academic who works in and studies community development, I can tell you that experiencing political tension, miscommunication, evolving visions and competing strategies during the development process are common. It is the messiness of asking how to best work together toward a shared future. Patience and inclusiveness are key.

Not only that, but we must realize that whomever we deem our adversary in a process, no matter how deeply their behavior bothers us, we can only change our behavior and the posture we take toward one another. Our world is filled with examples of disagreements where one side critiques another for a behavior that they themselves practice.

I am not naive. I understand that there are real and deep disagreements with significant consequences at stake in these processes. But too often, cynicism masquerades as “realism” and robs from us the power to choose our own attitudes and expectations.

In community development, we should remember that common spaces and public institutions should be judged by whom we include, not just the economic impact or aesthetic and emotional value for insiders. I learned that in part from my time in Bend.

From my view outside Central Oregon at the moment, I can see great potential and amazing opportunities. My time at Central Oregon Community College and OSU-Cascades taught me to value transparency and civic participation. It also taught me that my education is not my own, but it belongs to the community. For that reason, I wanted to share what I am learning and invite my neighbors into that continuous and reflective lifelong learning process that I try to engage myself.

The lesson I’m reflecting on today is that community is what we make of it, not in the distant future, but in the next minutes, next hours and next days. The benefits of a community with a four-year university can start now, in the way we plan with, include, critique and celebrate one another.

In this way the “ends” that we seek can be embodied in the “means” by which we work. I am grateful for that lesson.

So, I wanted to write from Phoenix, from the largest student body in the country at Arizona State, to say thanks to those with the wisdom and foresight to see that in a global world, you can have an impact from a small campus, in a small city. OSU-Cascades keeps the dreams of many alive, and dreams still change the world.

I know that because I studied at OSU-Cascades and it has opened doors to me around the world. The expansion of OSU-Cascades means the doors of world may open for me to come back to Bend and the city I love.

— Bjørn Peterson is an OSU-Cascades alum and a Ph.D. student at Arizona State University and lives in Phoenix, Ariz.