It took a while for me to realize how important Scattergood Friends School and Farm was to the work I was doing at the Great Plains Action Society’s Urban Resilience Hub in Iowa City since December 2025.
When the first work week at the Hub was announced I immediately made plans to attend. To be able to help build the Hub under Indigenous guidance was the opportunity I had been looking for. It was a logical next step in the journey that began nearly ten years ago, when I heard Sikowis Nobiss speak at the annual sessions of Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) at Scattergood in 2017, about building bridges with Native peoples. The invitation to join the work at the Hub came directly from Sikowis. It was a chance to be present in the right way — doing actual work together under Indigenous guidance, and building relationships.
In the information sent to those of us coming to do the work, Scattergood was listed as an option for a place to stay. I did stay at Scattergood during each of the work weeks.
I have been writing about throughlines — the pathways that define a life’s work and mark the significant events along the way. Five threads run through mine: Quaker practice, community of integrity, personal integrity, embodied land, and what did not reach us.
The table below traces every significant Scattergood connection across all five of my throughlines, and makes the case that the convergence at the Hub had to happen — that following each thread honestly left nowhere else to go. The interactive graph shows those same connections in visual form. (I’ll be expanding on this shortly).
Five Throughlines – One Acre of Ground
This is an interactive graph specific to Scattergood’s impacts on my life. Click on the legend to show that line on the graph. Click on a dot to see an explanation of that point.
One Acre of Ground refers to the land in Iowa City where the Great Plains Action Society is building the Indigenous-led Urban Urban Resilience Hub.
Channels Into Knowledge 
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