It’s been several years since I have worked on a jigsaw puzzle. Over the Thanksgiving week my grandkids and I started working on a 1000 piece puzzle. 1000 pieces seemed like a very lofty goal and there were many events going on during the week so it took awhile to complete. As we slowly sorted through the pieces and looked for how to begin I couldn’t help but think of the similarities with the community connection projects I work with. We were looking for what made each piece unique and where could we try to make connections. There was much trail and learning and times when we, maybe it was just me, wanted to toss the puzzle back in the box. But once we started making a few connections, they started to flow. As we progressed the focus became more on what were we missing. In community connecting and asset mapping often the challenge is the same, who and what are we missing, and let’s find them.

Well in the case of this puzzle, we searched and searched but were missing 5 pieces but it looked pretty good and it was fun working on it.