If you have been keeping up to date with the weekly editions of the Fledge Fractals, you might have noticed a name change in this section. And if you’re of a certain age you might be familiar with Arlo Guthrie’s song Alice’s Restaurant. Whether or not you’re familiar with the song doesn’t change the fact that we all know ALICE. That’s because these are the everyday people living in our urban, rural, and suburban communities who are employed that are earning more than the Federal Poverty Level, but not enough to afford the basics where they live. During the COVID-19 pandemic ALICE was our hero yet they still struggle to pay for housing, food, childcare, healthcare, transportation, and technology.

In 2021, Michigan had 1,570,724 people living in the ALICE threshold. The Fledge and The Fledge Foundation work to help people get above this threshold for basic needs, increasing the prosperity of our community, while decreasing the burden of basic needs. On the surface “Alice’s Restaurant” represents the absurdity of government bureaucracy, something that The Fledge has dealt with on a regular basis as we try to serve our community. With major gaps in generation, money, age, status, gender, etc. getting along is hard, but that doesn’t mean we should abandon what we stand for in fact according to Guthrie, it’s quite the opposite. One of the main themes that runs through Arlo’s music and our work here at The Fledge is the importance of resolving conflicts. Trying to calm down another party to the point of being quiet gets us nowhere. But he says that “over the long haul you make the most change by working together. When you learn to respect opinions of others that are different from yours, you learn to advance the sort of world you want in the first place–one in which people are free to disagree, without fighting or killing over it.”