For many people, community service is a chore or an addition to their regular lifestyle, but for some, it is their lifestyle.

Blyden Potts, who lives north of Shippensburg in Southampton Township, is the president the Middle Spring Watershed Association (MSWA), a coordinator for a grassroots presidential campaign office and is intermittently working on a petition to rezone local school board districts. The community’s life is his life. The community’s issues are his issues.

“I do things, I guess,” Potts said blatantly. He paused, not for the first time, trying to think of how his life has been shaped around the community. He said other people have told him he gets involved more than most people.

The first thing he did was join up with MSWA several years ago at a monthly meeting. When no one showed up, he let a few months go by and decided to go again. He finally joined up with them, and after time the president of MSWA decided to step down. The members looked to Potts, and he took the position.

“I’m sympathetic to environmental things, but I’m not like a huge environmental person, and I don’t think of environmental issues as my driving issues or anything along those lines,” he said, with eyes looking to his left, as if talking to more than person. But in his khaki pants, green ironed button-down T-shirt and inch-length spiked hair, there was no obvious indication what his driving issues are.

“I like the idea of people organizing to do things in their community,” he said. “I believe in grassroots democracy.”

Empowering people, Potts said, is really important to him, and having a lively and active democracy is essential for empowerment. When Potts saw that democracy in his local state legislative district was dwindling, he took action.

Potts feels very principled, said Catherine Clay, who is a friend of Potts and has worked with him in the community. Clay met Potts when he was campaigning against Pennsylvania State Rep. Rob Kauffman in 2010. She said she recognized Potts as a progressive who was running against someone she did not want to be in power, so she helped Potts get his name on the ballot. Kauffman, a Republican, has disgusting views on education issues, Clay said, but Potts had bigger issues than Kauffman.

“In a typical election cycle, something like 60 or 65 percent of the seats don’t face any real competition,” Pott said, explaining that was case with Kauffman in 2010. “What kind of democracy is that?

“I didn’t have any real illusions I was going to beat Kauffman, but I’m going to give voters a choice. I’m going to run and give them an option.”

Potts ran against Kauffman as an independent and a progressive, investing many of his own resources, Clay said, and Potts was also in the Green Party. But it was not Potts’ goal necessarily, to win, it was reinvigorating democracy into at least that election cycle in that district, according to Potts. The opposing party did not challenge Kauffman — nobody challenged him — so Potts said he stepped up to make a point. That point is that uncontested elections leave voters without a choice and leave the politician unaccountable.

“When legislatures run uncontested, the people are taken out of the equation. There’s no vote, there’s no election,” he said, with his arms spread out like wings, making sweeping motions. “That’s democracy down the drain, and that pisses me off.”

Though Potts lost the election and Kauffman regained his seat, he did not quite give up. Susan Spicka, a current school board member at the Shippensburg Area School District, challenged Kauffman, too. Potts became a campaign manager for her and was able to tell what worked and did not work when he ran, Clay said.

But after the elections, the state legislature gerrymandered the districts, taking Potts out of Kauffman’s district and adding in an overwhelming majority of Republicans. Today, Potts talked about his experience with politics and what he has learned about the political system, like a professor really getting the crux of the lesson.

He was in the middle of explaining how a third party candidate often syphons votes off from one of the other candidates when he began looking around the table in front of him. Potts’ arms were over the table, ready to grab something and his eyes were searching from behind his black-rimmed oval glasses. Then he made his move, grabbing three pens from a tall glass cup and laying them out on the table. These two, he said pointing to two pens next each other, are ideologically close so they are splitting the vote.

Potts went on with his lesson, but he later said that politics with capital “P” was not something he was always interested in. Though Potts was a professor, it was not in politics.

Standing at about 6 feet tall and weighing around 200 pounds, and constantly using his hands illustrate his speech, he is a recognizable person. But what is most recognizable is the way his eyes move across the room, analyzing and thinking about what he sees.

“I’ve always had a sociological interest; an interest in society,” he said with wide eyes. “How things are structured socially — I thought about politics in those terms.”

He stopped for a moment. Taking in a quiet breath he said he should start from the beginning of his life to explain how he got to where he is at now. A slight, unconscious, roll of his eyes and deeper tone in his already deep voice hinted that talking about his personal life was an inevitable chore.

“I was born in 1967,” he said, starting from the beginning. He is the oldest of four siblings; two brothers and two sisters. He was born in upstate New York and lived in Oxford and Plattsburgh for a time. Throughout his 48 years of life (49, in a couple of months), he explained how he evolved from having a vague interest in society to having a deep concern.

When he was growing up, a typical dinner conversation with his grandparents was about politics and social issues. He graduated from high school at 17 and was already enrolled at Clarkson University during his senior year in a dual program. Though he said he did very well in school, college was a different ball game.

“I didn’t really exercise a lot of control over my life at that point, right?” he said, finishing with his familiar cue as if you were there and should remember what he talking about. He went to Clarkson because his father, a veteran of the Vietnam War and civil engineer, went there.

Potts described his time in college as dark and that he questioned why he was there. He finally dropped out and worked elsewhere for a few years.

It was not until his job offered subsidized tuition that he went back to school at Norwich University and took a history course. When he ran into a sociologist they kicked off conversations about the field and Potts realized that was direction for him to go.

“I’m a sociologist — that’s inherit in my personality,” Potts said with the usual wave of his hand, sitting back in his chair. Growing up in rural Chenango County, Blyden said he was always interested in sociology, but he never thought of it as a formal academic field. Once he did, he followed that path to graduate school.

Potts earned his doctorate in sociology at the University of Michigan, where he met his wife, Alison Carey. Carey is a professor at Shippensburg University, where Potts was once an adjunct professor. During his stay at SU, Potts said he found he loved teaching and liked to get on a very basic level with students. He did not favor being called “Dr. Potts” and preferred to stick with Blyden.

For reasons Potts left untold, he is unemployed and is considering different directions he could take in his career. There is, however, no shortage of things for Potts to work on. He gardens and writes a lot, and also makes stain glass, though he said he is not very good at it. Through the year he hikes sections of the Appalachian Trail with a friend and enjoys fishing.

With little excitement in his voice he said he, his wife and their 12-year-old daughter took a trip to Hawaii in the past week. He said he enjoyed the time with his family, but the real point of the trip was for his wife to speak at a conference.

Balancing his time with his family and his personal endeavors is why he said he would not run for political office anytime soon.

In the past year he began work on collecting signatures to get the local government to redistrict the local school board wards. The zones are split up without reflecting the equal representation of the population that lives there. With the board unwilling to change that, Potts starting taking action on his own accord, but soon got distracted with the election season.

Potts, along with Clay, rented out a part of The Thought Lot, an arts and entertainment venue in Shippensburg, to create a local grassroots headquarters for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ campaign. The headquarters got started much in the same way that Potts became president of MSWA. He started doing something, and more people tagged along.

Potts said he became a default leader in both circumstances because people place more and more responsibility and expectations on him to continue what he is doing. The headquarters was the result, and about two dozen volunteers helped canvass the town with door-knob fliers and made phone calls to people around the country. Clay became an active part of it, partly because Potts’ involvement draws her in, she said.

Potts said he has an affinity toward Sanders because of his concerns for income inequality and the state of politics and democracy in the United States. Potts knew somewhat about Sanders from when he lived in Plattsburgh because it was near Sanders’ hometown of Burlington, Vermont. Sanders, like Potts, was an independent and had issues with how political parties were running elections. Potts said Sanders’ fight for social justice is also greatly important for him, and that is why he is a supporter.

“My concern for social justice has grown increasingly overtime, and I’m not exactly sure why,” Potts said, subtly squinting his eyes, causing his thick, but short, black eyebrows to droop slightly. Breaking away from his usual focused-serious wide-eyed look and constantly moving his arms and hands, Potts moved forward in his chair and rested his hands on the table. He said, after an hour of penetrating conversation, he could not explain why he was always interested in society, politics and civic engagement.

He said he did connect with one quote in particular though, from the playwright George Bernard Shaw, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable person in this way.”

“I see myself as an unreasonable person in this way,” Potts said, “doing things to make the world more like my vision of what I think it should be.”

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