Would you agree that Sequim is one of the best small cities in the U.S. for living as well as retiring? If you were to rank it on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you like living here? Are there things that would make your ranking higher? If so, what are they?

This is the first of a series of columns exploring the benefits of living in Sequim and how to ensure a bright future for the place we love.

We are incredibly fortunate to live where we do. Surrounded by natural beauty, with a wealth of resources available to solve problems and create new opportunities. We have a lot of advantages … and great potential.

Like many small towns, we’re trying to overcome obstacles, meet challenges and find opportunities to provide an even better life for everyone. In other words, despite our great advantages, this community doesn’t take things for granted — we want to find additional ways to do things even better, use our resources even more effectively and become even more creative and innovative.

Wherever you find a strong community, you see one that is vibrant, resilient, thriving. It marshals its resources in inventive ways. It’s a place characterized by imaginative collaboration between individuals, institutions, businesses and government. It’s a place of inclusiveness and openness where people want to live and can prosper.

But what enables a community to become, and to remain, that kind of place?

The answer to that question almost always is having a strong sense of community — a shared appreciation of what makes a particular place desirable and a shared vision of how to do that and how to keep it that way. This is what ties a group of people together, engages them, enables them to work together and to grow and thrive in ways that benefit everyone. It is what provides the common ground and the motivation — or imaginative collaboration.

All across the United States, as James Fallows notes in a recent article in The Atlantic (March 2016), small cities and communities are rising from the ashes of economic depression, high unemployment, poor schools, rising crime rates, endemic drug use or a host of other seemingly intractable problems.

Realizing they were not likely to get the kind of assistance they needed from either federal or state governments, they have blazed new paths and are succeeding in rebuilding themselves and forging bright futures. In each case they energized a strong sense of community and are flourishing as a result.

Sequim faces some of the same challenges these places did and we share many of the traits that enabled them to become vibrant, resilient, thriving. How can we work more effectively to ensure a bright future for the place we love?

Perhaps the best first step is to begin exploring, through an ongoing dialogue, how we can further strengthen our community and our sense of community.

And if we approach the process with mutual respect and courtesy — with a commitment to civility and civil discourse — we can honestly examine problems and explore potential solutions to find the best way forward.

CommunityPlus is a group of people whose mission is to generate a series of broad, inclusive conversations that lead to a shared understanding of who we are and a shared vision of how to make our community even better. If you’d like to know more, you can contact us at communityplus.sequim@gmail.com.