LEADING with Kellen Klein
Sisters, Oregon’s Kellen Klein on getting local leaders to get together
This is JOIN 101’s sixth installment of “What are you doing alone that you could be doing together?” — a series highlighting civic innovators we’ve encountered on JOIN OR DIE’s community screening tour who have asked themselves this pivotal question…and put their answers into action.
This week, Kellen Klein shares his journey of bringing local leaders in Sisters, Oregon together in a series of monthly meetups that are sparking new connections.
You can listen to Kellen’s story above and find the full transcript and helpful resources below. If you or someone you know is ready to follow Kellen’s example of gathering neighbors in creative new ways — share this story…and let us know what you create!
Onward to the next American joining revolution,
Rebecca Davis and Pete Davis
Rebecca: Today we meet Kellen Klein, who fell in love with a small town in Oregon.
Kellen: My family and I had started coming out to Sisters, which is this small town of now about 3,800 people in Central Oregon, close to Bend, just on the east side of the Cascade Mountain Range. We started coming out during COVID. We needed some open space with our kiddos where we didn’t have to get on a plane.
And when we started coming out here on vacation, we started making some friends, and then they introduced us to other friends. And oh, serendipity — we’re like one degree of separation removed from people that we both knew for one reason or another.
I just remember driving back one time and looking over at my wife and being like: Okay, when are we moving here? And she was like: Finally! The idea of being in a small, tight-knit community where we could really build our village was really appealing to us.
And so we moved here to build community. I’d had a mentor who had shared this quote: the scale of the solution doesn’t have to match the scale of the problem. And that started really resonating with me. As we moved here to Sisters, I was like, wow — doing stuff in the town where I live is an opportunity to chip away at these big global challenges: climate change, political polarization, wealth inequality, things like that. But at a scale that feels tangible.
💡 Learn more
⇛ Follow the latest from the Aqus Community Foundation.
⇛ Check out upcoming events at the Aqus Cafe.
⇛ Hear John speak at the upcoming Social Capital 2026 Conference and Human Algorithm Summit.
⇛ Watch a longer video about John’s work in Petaluma recorded by the International Social Capital Association — Social Capital in Action: A Blueprint from Petaluma’s Civic Experiments.
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