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There are two things we must be focused on to make our community livable and vital enough to attract returning young people and new residents, and to keep the folks we have: quality of life and regional resources.

We have human resources right here in our community that can be drawn upon, but we are not adequately using them or inviting them, or reaching out to them to join us in our efforts to increase the quality of life in our community.

Why are we not using the educational resources we have here? These resources may be people who live here but work elsewhere or the reverse. There are many people in our region, not just Winchester or Clark County, who have expertise in areas we need.

Often people are not aware of problems they can help with, but are happy to help when the needs are made known to them.

We also have the Winchester campus of Bluegrass Community & Technical College, the staff and students at our public and private schools, the University of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, Morehead State University, and many private institutions of higher learning, all within our region.

One good example of how we are already doing this is the Community Action Plan. We’re doing this entirely ourselves — our city and county governments and public school district plus interested citizens coming together for issues forums to assess goals and measure progress.

One area in which we struggle as a community is drug abuse. There must be professionals living or working in the region who have knowledge of drug abuse prevention and grant writing and who would be willing to give of their time to help the community find additional resources to address this growing problem. There may be programs at public and private universities we can partner with to generate increased resources.

We all have individual resources we can call upon and use to assist our community in becoming more livable.

After years of collectively not facing the local homelessness issue, we have a new organization working to address this problem. People who have the desire to help are using their individual resources to assemble the support needed to help others and the community.

Perhaps there are others — individuals, civic organizations, faith-based organizations, sororities or professional associations — that have an interest and expertise in the issues facing us such as animal welfare and helping find resources to make a new animal shelter a reality in our community, or working with the Bluegrass Heritage Museum to preserve our history and culture, or mentoring disadvantaged youth through the Partners in Education program. We have a wealth of opportunities to increase our quality of life by marshaling our personal and collective resources.

Vauvenargues, a French writer from the 1700s, said, “The greatest achievement of the human spirit is to live up to one’s opportunities and make the most of one’s resources.”

I contend that the greatest achievement of our community spirit is the same — to live up to our opportunities and make the most of our resources.

Resources can also be our collective wealth or means of producing wealth. That means not only financial wealth, although all indications are that this will follow an increased wealth of quality of life that includes culture, the arts, preservation of history and architecture, and all levels of education and enrichment.

Henry Ford II said, “What’s right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have great capacity — intellect and resources — to do something about them.”

I suggest we all get busy.

Contact Cora Heffner at heffnerc@ymail.com.

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