Gabby Miller and the Job of Hope
For lots of young people in this country, being ambitious means leaving your home town, especially if that town is small. Gabby Miller has faced this expectation head on. Finding her way professionally, finding her calling, has meant staying put.
Gabby didn’t always know her place was here. After graduating from Allegheny in the pandemic year of 2020, she briefly convinced herself she was going to move away with her then boyfriend. She channels for me her 21-year-old self: “Ok, we’re gonna go, we’re gonna move! Who knows, anything can happen! It’s COVID!” But it didn’t work out. Luckily.
Now, when people she graduated with tell her she needs to “get out of this town,” she has a response that’s deep and convincing, mostly because she’s living it.
“It sounds so cliché,” she says, “but I am doing what I’m made for.”
For the past three years Gabby has been the Community Librarian at the bustling Meadville Public Library. It’s a new position, first proposed by Dan Slozat, the library’s enterprising Director, but defined by Gabby, its first occupant.
The list of her responsibilities is long. It includes marketing the library—or, as she says, portraying the library to the community and challenging conventional views of what a library can be—; doing graphic design for the website and other materials; connecting community members to those resources and to each other; and managing the Community Space, part of the large, redesigned top floor of the library, where library patrons, including people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, routinely gather for group discussions, life-skills coaching, presentations, and a wide range of activities and events, all of which Gabby has helped create or promote (Drop-In Tech Help, Fiber Arts Club, Literacy Tutoring, therapy dog visits, Community Coffee Hour, etc.).
It’s really all about building relationships, she said. How so? Her explanation flows fast, her voice full of feeling: “It’s the same folks coming in and us (the staff) being excited to see them, us asking things about them that show we’ve been listening in the past. If someone got a new apartment, saying ‘how’s your new apartment going?’ Or ‘how’s your new job?’ And the beauty of being able to extend a new relationship past just your initial interaction with them.” This sustained human connecting is one of things she calls “little glimmers” that give her peace about staying in Meadville. “There’s such a beauty there,” she says.
Her commitment to community runs deep. She’s on the boards of three community organizations (Crawford County Mental Health Awareness Program, the county’s Community Council, and the local Coalition on Housing). It all started in high school, Gabby says, when she was asked to join a focus group to discuss the idea of a teen lounge in Meadville—the town lacked an alcohol-free space where teenagers could hang out. The experience of what she calls “collectively dreaming” and having her input taken seriously was thrilling to her. Soon she was attending board meetings of the Meadville Neighborhood Center, and then she was on the board herself, its only teenage member.
One thing that gives her peace about staying in Meadville is the connecting she helps foster in the library, what she calls "little glimmers."
In college she majored in Community and Justice Studies. Many of the ideas she encountered there inform what she’s doing today. She paraphrases freely from Out of the Wreckage, George Monbiot’s book about grassroots alternatives to competitive individualism. For Gabby, as for Monbiot, we can’t get to a place where more people feel they belong in our society without first dreaming about what such a society, or community could look like. Ideally, Gabby sees the library’s Community Space as a site for just such collective dreaming.
The ideal is hard to get to, though. Meadville’s brick-and-mortar Neighborhood Center and the Teen Lounge have come and gone. The gap between how things could be in the community and how they are, especially for the town’s vulnerable population, is painfully wide, and Gabby sees that every day, too. Meeting people where they are, when you’re Gabby Miller, means feeling their struggles.
One spring, when she also had to run the library’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, a woman she’d helped had to come back twice because the tax return they’d worked on, which was that of the woman’s deceased husband, kept getting bounced back by the IRS—there was some flaw Gabby wasn’t catching. Gabby remembers apologizing, and the woman sitting in Gabby’s office talking about her husband, who had died that year, and how she wished she and he had had more time. And Gabby just sobbed.
A different person would be demoralized by all this—all the strikes against so many people, the distance of collective dreams, the intractable problems in the world at large. As with everything else, Gabby has thought this through. “Nihilism is easy,” she says. “But it doesn’t help anything. It’s just a way to diffuse hope. And it’s almost our job to hope.” For her the work isn’t so much about immediate results. It’s part of a larger effort in town to “plant little seeds” in and for the community, like the Community Orchard on North Street now literally bearing fruit. She cites the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) idea of seventh generation thinking, a perspective that values a person’s actions by how they will benefit people seven generations in the future. “There’s real beauty in the long game.”
The day-to-day bears its own fruit, too. A regular second floor patron recently told her the support he got from the group at the Community Coffee Hour helped him hold down a job longer than ever before. That same day he celebrated a year of sobriety with the group.
A few days after our interview, I sat in on a Coffee Hour, the weekly event Gabby calls “my baby.” Fifteen of us sat around a long narrow table with ten more at small round tables nearby. Gabby stood by the head of the main table, managing the discussion. She didn’t talk a lot. She moved things along. She prompted with follow-up questions and new ideas. With a gesture she gently quieted someone speaking out of turn.
You could tell there were many regulars. Billy, for example, who sat next to me and spoke with cheerful frequency. Everyone knew Billy. The special guest that day was Julia Kemp, artistic director of Meadville’s historic Academy theater (and another young Allegheny grad who has stayed in town). Everyone got a chance to talk, and Julia got asked lots of questions about what it was like being a director and actor. There was laughter, there were digressions. When someone sneezed, a chorus of “bless yous!” rang out from some of the people with disabilities. The hour clipped by, borne on a current of good feeling and what could only be called fellowship.
And what lies ahead for Gabby Miller? “I was really fixated on where I was going to be in so many years,” she says, “but right now, who knows?” She laughs. Sitting in on Community Coffee Hour, you could see why it might not matter to her that she didn’t know.
Gabby thinks of her work as planting seeds in the community. "There's real beauty in the long game."