During my time at Evergreen, I sought to answer the question, “What does it take to build connection in a disconnected world?” As my inquiry deepened, I found a simpler heading for my work: the study of community resiliency.

My studies took the form of a three-year community participatory action (CPAR) research project. During the project I took part in over 250 interviews and community events. I trained in CPAR, social entrepreneurship, and systems change at the Evergreen Changemaker’s Lab and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology U-Lab.  I accumulated 32 hours towards a psychodrama facilitator certification, and completed a six-month training to become a community grief facilitator.

Participatory action research is not a passive practice; during my studies I found a new role as a community leader and activist, group facilitator, and social entrepreneur. I started a community singing group at Evergreen. I co-founded a non-profit corporation. I hosted five community grief events, including one in a Washington State prison. I co-facilitated a townhall on mental health during my internship with Thurston County Commissioner Rachel Grant. I hosted activist Aaron Johnson at the 2025 Evergreen Equity Symposium.

My research took me deep into surrounding communities, to substance use treatment clinics, to community centers and churches, to tribal gatherings, and to the halls of government.

My engagement with the carceral system led to my selection as the first AmeriCorps staff member of a new initiative at Evergreen, the Evergreen Prison Education Program (EPEP). Through EPEP, I supported a baccalaureate program in Stafford Creek Correctional Center, teaching seminars on community grieving and singing, and personal vision.

In the summer of 2026, I had the unique honor of graduating alongside our first graduating class of incarcerated students, in a ceremony at Stafford Creek.

It was also through my role at EPEP that I can report perhaps the pinnacle of my resiliency work. In August 2026, one of my incarcerated colleagues was inspired by my grief seminar to host his own grief gathering at a special event in the prison.

My training in systems change also led me to engage in community resiliency issues at the political level. I spoke before the Washington State legislature twice, including testifying in 2026 in support of a bill promoting the wellbeing of boys and men.

My research led me to an international inquiry on community practices of belonging, which culminated in a research trip to Spain and Portugal, and an intensive workshop on community-building at the renowned eco-village, Tamera.

One of the products of my research, which I will be bringing to my community in the Pacific Northwest, is a nascent non-profit centered around community practices of belonging.

Another product of my time at Evergreen—I am emerging as a changemaker in my community. I now understand the world through a complex ecosystemic frame. I am trained in the fundamentals of making positive change at scale. My voice, as an activist for a better world, has sharpened. And I have found my life’s purpose, which is to be in service of life on earth. And my particular mission, which is to help human beings come home to themselves, to each other, to the earth, and to spirit.

As far as what it takes to build connection in a disconnected world, I believe the answer is simple. Our indigenous neighbors in the Pacific Northwest and throughout the world are our guides. We must re-assert our fundamental belonging to the earth (rather than the backwards articulation of modernity, that the earth belongs to us.)

How do we do it? Through the practices and wisdom traditions that our ancestors relied on for most of humanity’s natural history. Through the ancient art of coming together around song and music, grief and gratitude. Through gathering, through ritual, through facing the hard things together. Through becoming a people again.

Don’t misunderstand me—We cannot go back in time.

We must re-learn and remember how to be human in the world we live in now. We must assert village culture in our cities. Our sense of tribe must be global, to face the global crises currently threatening all of us, and the rest of life on earth.

This is the work I pledge to undertake in the chapters that follow this one. My prayer is that we do come together as a people before it is too late. And that the future ones, our children’s children, celebrate us as right and well ancestors. As those who laid the groundwork for a new epoch in which humanity comes home to nature, and life on earth thrives once again.

We’ve got to get home… We’re just embers. Maybe we’re starting to see a flame.

–Paul Chiyokten Wagner, 2026

Evan Wagoner-Lynch

Evergreen State College Class of 2026

Bachelor of Arts in Community Resiliency

St̕č̓as / Olympia