YES! Magazine cofounder Sarah van Gelder sends dispatches from an eighteen-state journey across America, describing how people abandoned by big national institutions are developing creative community-based solutions to environmental and social problems.

Sarah van Gelder was worried about the current state of American society. Environmental destruction, growing poverty, urban decay, rural decline—it’s a long list. Can we turn this around, she wondered? Are there answers we haven’t found yet? She confided her fears to a friend, who said to her, “If the universe could deploy the one small person that is you, what would it have you do?” Her answer surprised them both: “I’d go out traveling and see for myself.”

So driving a twelve-year-old Toyota pickup truck with a tiny camper hand-painted by a Suquamish artist, van Gelder visited eighteen states and five Indian reservations, big cities and small towns. She wanted to meet people at the margins of society who were the least embedded in the big institutions that reward status quo thinking.

She came away believing that a profound change is sweeping the country. She went to all kinds of places and met all kinds of people who were dealing with very different problems, but what united them all was best summed up by a phrase she saw on a mural in Newark: “We the People LOVE This Place.” Through the connection we each have to place—our physical and ecological place and also the human community—we are creating a new America.

Sarah van Gelder is the cofounder and editor-at-large at YES! Magazine. She leads the framing and development of each issue and writes a column introducing each issue. She writes interviews and stories and blogs at YES!, blogs on Huffington Post, and speaks on cutting-edge innovations that show not only is another world possible, it is being created.