People usually think of a community’s exports as the things it produces, like timber, agriculture and manufacturing. Maybe some product or industry that puts a place on the map. I’ve always thought Tenino’s greatest export was something different.
Strength. Resilience. Grit.
My hometown has demonstrated those qualities to the country, and sometimes the world, more than once. But of everything that has ever come out of Tenino, there is nothing I am prouder of than Raise for Rowyn.
However, I wish with everything in me that it had never needed to exist.
On Sept. 16, 2014, 17-month-old Rowyn Johnson died in a tragic accident at her family’s home outside Tenino. Rowyn’s father, Cody, is one of my oldest friends.
There's something about growing up in a small town that is difficult to explain to people who haven’t experienced it. Some friendships aren’t measured in years; they’re measured in lifetimes, even generations. They stretch from cradle to grave. Families overlap and friendships are passed down. Your children grow up together because you grew up together.
Rowyn was the same age as my daughter. They were born 10 months apart, and of course I imagined they would grow up together just like their fathers had.
The morning after the accident, I got off duty at the fire station and drove straight to the Johnsons’ house. There wasn’t anything profound to say. There rarely is when something truly terrible happens. Sometimes the only thing you can do is show up. So that’s what I did. We sat together on the front porch trying to understand what had just happened and trying to figure out what came next.
I had lost a child myself a few years earlier, under very different circumstances, and knew enough about grief to understand there wasn’t anything I could say. I could only let my friends know they weren’t going to walk through it alone.
None of us could have imagined where that journey would lead. Because something remarkable started happening around us.
Tenino, our community, showed up.
Friends showed up. Neighbors showed up. Businesses showed up. People who knew the family showed up. People who didn’t know them showed up.
Money poured into an online fundraiser. People brought food. They helped with expenses. They found whatever ways they could to carry some small portion of a burden no family should ever have to carry. Years later, Brynn described what that meant simply: “It brought my community together.”
Then, something else extraordinary happened.
Brynn began asking what they could do with all that love. The community had given them more support than they needed, and rather than simply accepting it, she wanted to find a way to pass it forward. She and Cassie Miller began talking about helping the next family.
The idea was beautifully simple. When a family loses a child, grief arrives with bills. Funeral expenses. Caskets. Cemetery costs. Headstones. Things no parent ever expects to shop for, often while they can barely comprehend what has happened. Tenino had helped carry that burden for the Johnson family.
Now they were going to help carry it for others.
That idea became Raise for Rowyn. The concept grew directly from the relief the family had experienced when their own community showed up for them. At first, it was two women and an idea. Then it grew.
Within its first two years, Raise for Rowyn had already helped 66 families. And the calls for help kept coming.
Twelve years later, Raise for Rowyn has helped more than a thousand families across the country. Its work has grown beyond financial assistance to include ongoing emotional support for grieving families. Think about that for a moment.
More than one thousand families. All connected by the worst days of their lives.
And somewhere in that darkness, an organization born in a little town called Tenino shows up and says: “You don’t have to carry this burden alone. We got you.”
That’s what makes Raise for Rowyn so special to me. It isn’t simply a nonprofit that happens to be located in my hometown, created by some of my closest friends. It carries something about my hometown with it wherever it goes, and it says something about who we are.
When Tenino rallied around one grieving family in 2014, nobody was designing an organization that would someday help more than a thousand families. They were simply doing what communities are supposed to do. They were showing up.
Brynn and Cassie found a way to take that love and export it.
There is another part of their story that shouldn’t be overlooked. This tragedy could have destroyed relationships.
Instead, Brynn and Cassie chose to walk through their grief together. Years later, in an interview with The Chronicle, Cassie explained that people were drawn to their story because they could have responded with anger, blame and destruction, but didn’t. Brynn said people heard their story and found hope.
There is strength in that. There is grace in that. There is grit in that.
And there is something very Tenino about it.
Sept. 16 marks 12 years since we lost Rowyn.
Twelve years since we sat on that front porch trying to understand how a family was going to take the next step. And 12 years later, Raise for Rowyn is still taking those next steps with families all over.
On Oct. 21 at 1:15 p.m., following the Tenino Chamber of Commerce meeting, our community will gather again — this time to cut the ribbon on Raise for Rowyn’s new headquarters.
I’ve gotten to cut a lot of ribbons over the years. They’re usually celebrations of something new: a building, a business, a road, a park.
This one will mean something different.
None of us sitting on that porch in September of 2014 could have imagined that someday we would be cutting a ribbon on a headquarters for an organization helping grieving families far beyond our little town.
But that’s what resilience actually looks like.
It isn’t pretending something terrible didn’t happen. It isn’t somehow becoming untouched by grief.
Resilience is taking something that could have broken you and refusing to let the breaking be the end of the story.
Rowyn’s life was far too short. But her reach has become enormous.
Every family Raise for Rowyn helps carry a little piece of her story with them. And whether they know it or not, they carry a little piece of Tenino. too.
Strength.
Resilience.
Grit.
That’s our greatest export.
And I can think of no better example of it than Raise for Rowyn.
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Wayne Fournier is a firefighter, Thurston County commissioner and former mayor who has spent more than three decades working in public safety. His column appears in The Chronicle twice each month. Learn more about Raise for Rowyn online at https://www.raiseforrowyn.org.
