The Norfolk Hub offers a professionally supported co-working space for individuals, a dedicated workspace for non-profits, and a welcoming gathering place for the community. Vint Lawrence was a devoted gardener, and it is not much of a stretch to say that he seeded conversations, watering them on occasion with whisky and sometimes adding a bit of fertilizer from the Coalition for Sound Growth, so that they produced in time such things as the Town’s Plan of Conservation and Development and the town website. Vint loved Norfolk deeply and had a boundless faith in its future—in the rich possibilities of its natural beauty and its commitment to the arts, in the resourcefulness of its residents, and in what could happen if Norfolk’s people and organizations really worked together to make Norfolk every more fully itself. Several years ago, Vint’s attention turned to Norfolk’s multitude of volunteer organizations, and he took an early lead in tracking them all down and trying to bring them into more explicit conversation and engagement with one another—a project subsequently taken up and continued by the Norfolk Economic Development Commission, where the value of greater shared awareness has become abundantly clear. Norfolk Foundation has acquired the Corner Store building that also consumed so much of Vint’s attention and energy in recent years, and is building it it out as a space shared with the Norfolk’s larger nonprofit community. In addition to serving as the office for Norfolk Foundation, “Norfolk Hub” will offer work and meeting spaces and professional support to its member organizations. It will also include space for the showing of art or of projects proposed or being carried out by its members, and will serve as a natural first stop for visitors to Norfolk in search of maps and advice. Membership would be based on a very modest fee, and the space and its facilities—wi fi, computers, printing and scanning resources, phone messaging services, video conferencing, storage space--would be available to members around the clock. Vint was interested in everyone and everything—the town’s commercial center, the Yale summer programs, the jobs done by Norfolk’s tireless volunteer organizations—and he planted his seeds wherever he could—at town meetings, over dinner, on Windrow or Westside as his dogs wandered here and there. In dedicating “Norfolk Hub” to Vint’s memory, Norfolk Foundation means to create a place that ensures such conversations continue and that what he has planted continues to flourish.
