Hera first met Carl Frankel, who she playfully referred to as "the Mayor of Uptown Kingston," at swing dance lessons. The Woodstock artist has also attended Frankel's popular community gatherings from their inception in 1999. "Being a sculptor, I am something of an entrepreneur," she said. "I thought these gatherings were great because I found [them] a way to meet other entrepreneurs and network with people who were young and vital to the Kingston community. It attracted me enough that I actually bought a house in Kingston." Although she eventually sold the house, Hera said that she even landed a tenant through Frankel's e-newsletter, Carl's List.

Frankel's community gatherings began with the Ulster County transplant getting a group of his friends together for a monthly dinner at a now defunct uptown Kingston restaurant, The Tapping Frog. It was as casual a concept as Frankel's patronizing a restaurant he liked and getting his friends together to break bread. He started an e-mail list to inform people of the dinner times and it rapidly transformed into something greater. We met on an afternoon in mid-August on the patio of Frankel's home in Kingston, where he told me, "I began collecting people's e-mails to announce these parties, and before I knew it I had this little e-newsletter going. The next thing I know, people started asking me, 'Will you announce I am selling a futon?'"

And thus was born Carl's List, as a complimentary community newsletter, named by others as a playful poke at Craig's List, the popular online classified ad service. In essence it has evolved into something very similar, with an added goal of fostering a sustainable community in the Hudson Valley.

"I had never been community-minded, but I had over 1,000 people on my mailing list. There were 60-80 people showing up for my community parties," Frankel explained. "I just woke up and realized that it was a success, even though I hadn't really tried to make it a success. I was just filling a need that the community [had], and all of a sudden I found myself to be this node in the local information network."

As a struggling fiction writer in the late 1980s, the Princeton and Columbia Law alum was supporting himself through technical writing when he decided to devote himself to eco-writing, focusing on sustainable and socially responsible businesses. He became enamored with the idea of saving the concept of community in a disjointed age, an age that he viewed as a product of corporate globalization. The major results of this interest were Frankel's two nonfiction books, 1998's In Earth's Company: Business, Environment and the Challenge of Sustainability and Out of the Labyrinth (2004), which Frankel claims as one of his two proudest achievements. The other is his business—or as he refers to it, his social enterprise—Our Community Networks, which has a two-part mission statement: 1) To build local community; and 2) To support local businesses. He created the system from a desire to see the rising tide of the free-market economy truly lift all boats, not just the yachts.

One can get an idea of the complexity of his business philosophy from the central ideas in Out of the Labyrinth. The Cliff Notes version follows: Everyone is comprised of three personae that live in a quest for balance—the Strategist, the Seeker, and the Citizen. The Strategist pursues goals in the objective domain; the Citizen participates in the social domain; and the Seeker quests for meaning. Inherent in the psyche of each of us is this triad of subpersonalities. Frankel believes that true community could be the lynchpin of balancing these personae through cultivating an interactive network of socially responsible businesses to help people break through society's fragmentation.

Taking tangible steps to make this ideal community a reality, in addition to the Carl's List free classified service Frankel has also used his extensive contacts to build a network of service providers and retailers who accept a discount card called the Hudson Valley Passport. For a $40 initial investment, the card gets consumers 10 to 25 percent off purchases at participating businesses. At this point Frankel claims over 250 local businesses honoring the card, with more signing up daily.

"We are a network- and partnership-based organization, and we are setting out to build relationships with organizations that will reach out to their constituents," he enthused. "Because it is all about building community. It takes a community to make this happen. And when people realize that they can save money, that's a great motivator to grow this."