The Photograph That Would Mean Something Two Years Later
During his 2024 campaign, Bola published a series of four visual pieces on Facebook accompanied by "Sweet Dreams." The posts continued attracting attention over the following months.
One of the central images carried a large clock. But the clock had no hands.
It represented generations of political time passing. Governments formed, oppositions challenged them, elections came and went, and ordinary life continued underneath it all.
Around the clock were the people who keep society moving — young people going to work, older people continuing to work, families trying to build lives, communities dealing with economic pressure and pollution, police, governments and public institutions forming part of the environment surrounding everyday life.
The artwork was never intended to condemn every political party, police officer, public servant or institution appearing within it. It expressed a much deeper frustration: people could spend their entire lives working, paying taxes and contributing to society while still struggling to obtain the basic security that all of that work was supposed to help create.
The clock had no hands because, from the perspective represented in the artwork, time kept moving while too many people were still waiting for their turn.
And while these images appeared, "Sweet Dreams" was playing. At the time, Bola could not have known how strangely appropriate those images would eventually become.
A Street He Did Not Yet Know
Among the campaign imagery was a photograph of Waterloo Street in Saint John, New Brunswick. At the time, Bola did not know Waterloo Street.
He had never lived there. He did not know the shelter community that existed around it. He did not know the people who would eventually become part of his daily life. He could not have known that in 2026 he would experience homelessness in Saint John himself.
Then life brought him to the street that had already appeared in the campaign imagery.
Waterloo Street became real. It became walks and conversations. It became the Hub, Out of the Cold and Outflow. It became conversations at King Square. It became sitting in front along the Waterloo Street rock wall. It became Outflow's community dinners.
It became conversations with people staying in the men's and women's shelters, neighbourhood residents and people living through homelessness and severe financial hardship.
It became a small group sitting near the cemetery beside Out of the Cold, talking seriously about housing, tiny homes, independence, ownership and what somebody actually needs to rebuild a life.
And it became part of the environment in which Municipal Tiny Homes and Foundational Homes continued to develop.
Then Someone Recognized the Photograph
One of the people Bola came to know around the shelter community was a man he called "Poland Frenchy." There were several people around the shelters known as Frenchy, so this was simply the name Bola used to distinguish him.
Poland Frenchy began pointing things out in the old photograph. The street. The surroundings. The details.
And, according to Bola's recollection, something remarkable became apparent. Four people visible near the bottom of that old image — two on the left and two on the right — were people connected with life on Waterloo Street.
There was also lettering on the left side of the photograph that appeared remarkably close to "Bola."
It was an image from a campaign two years earlier, from a place Bola did not know, containing people and details that would only become meaningful after he eventually found himself there.
When an Old Image Becomes Part of Your Own Life
Looking back from 2026, the coincidence is difficult to ignore.
A campaign concerned with people feeling economically trapped had used the image. A clock without hands represented people waiting while time continued passing. "Sweet Dreams" accompanied the four-part visual presentation. Waterloo Street appeared before Bola knew what Waterloo Street would eventually mean to him.
Then, two years later, Bola was there. He was experiencing homelessness himself. He was walking with some of the people whose lives reflected the very struggles his earlier political work had attempted to describe.
He was listening. He was learning. He was having conversations with Courtney McLaughlin about the enormous amount of human ability that society can leave undervalued and unused.
He was talking with people around Waterloo Street, King Square, the shelters and community dinners. And some of those conversations were helping develop practical ideas about permanent housing, human capacity and municipal economic participation.
The person who had once asked, "What about us?" eventually found himself living among people asking the same question in different ways.
It Felt as Though the Pieces Were Meant to Meet
There is no need to claim that the photograph predicted the future. The events themselves are powerful enough.
For Bola, looking back at that image after everything that happened carried a deeply personal feeling: it felt as though somehow the pieces had been meant to meet.
None of that meaning was visible to him when the photograph was originally used. It became visible only after he lived through what came next.
And that is what makes the image important to the history of CDMM. A photograph that once represented a political message eventually became a photograph of a place, people and struggle that Bola would come to know personally.
The image did not create CDMM. But by 2026, Bola had unexpectedly stepped into part of the world that the image had been trying to describe.
And from inside that experience came another stage in the development of the Community-Driven Municipal Model, Municipal Tiny Homes, Foundational Homes and the principle that communities should recognize and invest in the human capacity already living among them.