Iowa City nonprofit showcases community-centered culture through short documentary series

IOWA CITY — For the founders of one Iowa City nonprofit, the solution to big problems starts small.

Resilient Sustainable Future for Iowa City, started by Michal and Riley Eynon-Lynch in 2021, has been offering grants to support neighbors getting together, forming relationships, building trust and solving neighborhood problems.

Now, they’re bringing those stories to the big screen with documentary shorts — about 90 seconds each — highlighting community engagement in lieu of previews or advertisements before each movie screening at FilmScene.

With 12 documentary shorts released since January and about six more in the works, the nonprofit is entering 2025 with plans to continue the successful Neighbors to Neighborhood Grant — both on and off screen. In 2024, it supported about 100 projects.

“We’re going to make it normal to have different viewpoints without hating each other and canceling each other, but instead finding points of agreement and common humanity,” said Michal. “We’re going to tell these stories and support these kinds of neighborhood projects not because it’s cute or quaint, but because it’s imperative that we relearn how to build together — to cocreate a positive, loving, eco-centered future.”

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After teaching and building a pair of multimillion dollar education technology companies, Michal said the crises she was seeing could be solved only by reclaiming the power of communities at the hyperlocal level. As issues like political polarization seem to worsen with each election cycle, Michal and Riley say the answer is not increased funding for the national political machine.

It’s funding their neighbors. What that looks like varies from neighborhood to neighborhood.

For Iowa City’s Longfellow neighborhood, it’s a front porch music festival that brings neighbors together over music. For the Lucas Farms neighborhood, it’s a community cookie swap. Soccer, English classes, coaching for second-generation American children and a bike library are all part of it, too.

All of the diverse projects are doing at least one small but mighty thing: starting a conversation.

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Josh Booth, producer of the short documentaries and owner of Diamond Label Films, hopes that the films show others what’s going on right in their backyards.

“We have these huge celebrations in the downtown area, but we also have these small, micro celebrations,” he said. “It doesn’t always take this huge nonprofit or a huge act to influence a community.”

By getting neighbors to talk to teach other, the nonprofit aims to rebuild resilient social networks that use the streets in front of homes, rather than the social media apps on phones.

In short, Riley calls it the “anti-social media.”

“We’re losing how to talk to each other, how to disagree and find compromise. It’s a scary and alienating way we live, where we don’t feel like we have neighbors,” he said.

But the rebuilding of resilient networks isn’t as complex as it may sound. For one Iowa City resident featured by the project, scaring is caring. Each year, Alex Rain builds more and more props from reclaimed materials to add to their House of Horrors for trick-or-treaters on Rochester Street.

“It’s very easy to sit in your house, and you don’t know your neighbors,” Rain said. “When everyone comes together and you meet people one on one, those fears and differences tend to fall away.”

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In the Lucas Farms neighborhood, events as simple as cookie swaps have given old relationships new depth. After years collecting nuts from various neighborhood trees, one person simply was known by his neighbors as “walnut man.”

Then, the older resident stopped showing up to events, prompting concern about his health and welfare. After he suffered an illness, neighbors found him again — this time, knowing him as Glenn from Cottonwood Street.

“If we can’t make it work at the local level, we’re not going to make it work at a larger level,” said Trevor Harvey, co-organizer of the Front Porch Music Festival featured in the Longfellow neighborhood. “Even one event can sustain community ties throughout a year.”

The nonprofit’s founders hope the films and partnerships, in addition to building a culture centered on solidarity over individualism, will empower anyone to take on similar efforts and make a difference — all of which, they come to realize, is within reach.

“We need to focus on not only addressing issues we know about, but building a system and culture capable of solving future problems,” Michal said.

Since selling their former companies, Pear Deck and Activegrade, Michal and Riley have funded the Resilient Sustainable Future for Iowa City with $20 million, a donation that will allow it to operate its multiple programs with a $500,000 annual budget. Though the 501(c)(3) organization is well-funded, it is not designed to operate into perpetuity.

“We hope to accomplish our mission and be done,” Michal said.

Comments: Features reporter Elijah Decious can be reached at (319) 398-8340 or elijah.decious@thegazette.com.