Our Mission
Community2gether connects & engages people to gather and implement ideas to improve our Town.
Photo by Dave Erfer
Who We Are
Community2gether is a 501(c)(3) organization. Your donations are gratefully accepted.
The Warwick Valley is comprised of the Town of Warwick, the Villages of Greenwood Lake, Florida and Warwick, and 7 Hamlets—Amity, Bellvale, Edenville, Little York, New Milford, Pine Island and Sterling Forest. Community2gether has distinguished itself over the last three decades as an incubator of new community initiatives and projects, providing them with services such as banking, insurance and tax-deductible status. The C2g Board has conducted visioning sessions to get the fullest possible input from the community regarding its needs and desires. In the coming years, Community2gether is poised to take on a leadership role in enhancing the growth and success of its existing projects and initiatives, supporting them with resources they identify, and strengthening the synergies among them so that they nourish one another.
Photo by Dave Erfer
Get Involved
Community2gether hosts Community Action Forums each year, where ideas from the 2017 visioning are presented for consideration. All community members are invited to these forums and are encouraged to step up and get involved with making these initiatives become a reality. Subscribe to our mailing list to be notified of future forums and C2g initiatives.
Photo by Dave Erfer
Where It All Began
It’s the spring of 1993 and a small group of Warwick friends get together for dinner at the home of Fan and Lou Cox, living at the time on Upper Wisner Rd. Over and above a meal, the purpose of the gathering is to see the rough cut of the video that one of the group, film-maker Anne Macksoud, has made on a dramatically successful visioning/revitalization project in Chattanooga, led by an urban planning consultant named Gianni Longo.
After the film ended, as we were all congratulating Anne, Lou Cox said — and I think these are his exact words — “You know, we could do that here.” The idea took hold immediately, first in the Cox’s living room and very quickly, almost virally in those pre-internet days, around the community.
By Labor Day weekend, Gianni had agreed to do it — I don’t recall the $ negotiations, but he felt very close to Anne and wanted to “do a small town" — and we held a fund-raiser cocktail reception on the lawn of Fred and Jo Vander Kloot that raised $4,000. So we launched the C2000 visioning that fall with a process that Gianni and we had worked out: Series One meetings which led to Series Two meetings which led to the Vision Fair, held in the Warwick Center, on Sunday, March 13, 1994.
On that memorable day, the Queen Village Queens, Warwick’s famous, all-female drum and bugle corps provided the kickoff, Rep Ben Gilman gave a speech, and people signed up to form 18 Task Forces. That’s how it started.