I have been doing some genealogy research lately and came across this:

“March 19, 1887 Yonkers Statesman: Thomas Mitchell of Webster Avenue who has been suffering for two weeks past with rheumatism and throat affection is able to be out again.”

Looks like back in the day the newspaper actually watched our for the community. I think Front Porch Forum is filling that nitch today (I know the Free Press certainly isn’t). If you are holed up and need a little help at some point, I hope you’ll let your neighbors know. We’ll bring soup.

See you at the rink!

FPF is expanding beyond Burlington… we now serve one-third of Vermont.  More than 32,000 members participate in rural areas, suburbs, and cities.  Imagine this level of engagement in every part of Vermont and beyond!  Let us know if you’d like to help bring FPF to your town (just enter your address on our home page and complete the form).

Three cheers for the tens of thousands FPF members in Vermont… and here’s to vibrant neighborhoods in 2012!

In 1925 the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss published his classic essay “The Gift,” which argued that contrary to the textbook account of primitive man merrily trading beaver pelts for wampum, no society was ever based on barter. The dominant practice for thousands of years was instead voluntary gift-giving, which created a binding sense of obligation between potentially hostile groups. To give a gift was not an act based on calculation, but on the refusal to calculate. In the societies Mauss studied most closely — the Maori of New Zealand, the Haida of the Pacific Northwest — people rejected the principles of economic self-interest in favor of arrangements where everyone was perpetually indebted to someone else.

“Perpetually indebted to someone else”… this sums up so much of what I love about my community life in Burlington, VT right now.  We have a critical mass of people who willingly have jumped into debt with each other… not monetary debt, rather favor debt.

I was raised to value making my contribution to others while taking great pains to avoid accepting the same from others.  So were lots of folks here.  But that’s a recipe for setting yourself apart, for isolation.  As my family has learned to accept favors from those around us, it’s made our contributions to others that much more meaningful and personal.

Now, through Front Porch Forum, MealTrain, our church, school, neighborhood and other means, we ask and offer favors daily from hundreds of friends, neighbors and acquaintances.  Each request works against isolation and lays down another thread in the web of community that supports our life.  This is a crucial asset… as much as our house, my job, the kids’ college savings.

My brother and his family are planning a holiday visit to see us in Vermont this month.  We could all jam into our house, but I know they would sleep better if we had more space for the two families.  Hotels are expensive and distant… B&Bs too.  So, I put the word out to neighbors and got several offers of empty houses that we could use on our block.  These neighbors are traveling out of state and are glad to share their home while they’re away.  We’ve done this a dozen times over the past few years… offering or asking for empty-house guest lodging.  Make that hundreds of times if we include other favors… meals, rides, tools, advice, kids stuff, labor, baby/pet sitting, on and on.

This is incredibly generous and trusting of all involved… but it’s also keeping each of us “perpetually indebted to our neighbors” in a way that makes our community stronger with each exchange.

Today’s Burlington Free Press had a thoughtful article on a declining middle class, as exemplified by a Jeffersonville family… My impressions:

1) Good for my Cambridge village neighbor Mike Moser for providing factual background and context for the story. As someone involved in helping Vermonters discuss important policy issues, I have found that the more relevant facts I have, the better. Sounds obvious but it is remarkable how easily I go straight to interpretation and opinion when what I really need is more information.

2) As I read it I said “thank God for my job” because just three years ago that’s where I was, working three iffy jobs to unsuccessfully scrape together enough money to pay the bills. My family and church communities were helpful in every way when I asked them, but what I really needed is what I finally got – a good paying job. This job gave my wife a good last two years of her life in more ways than one. Sometimes I think that government and non-profits would help people more if they would focus more on simply letting the job creators do their thing. Local applications of this might be – sorry if I offend – saying “no” a little less reflexively to new business proposals. I know there are tradeoffs, but as we weigh the pros and cons in our own minds and in forums like this, perhaps the life-saving creation of a few good jobs should count a little more.

3) As I read it I also said “thank God for the safety net” beyond church and family that provided health care and yes even food at the most difficult times. I made perhaps 10 visits to Lamoille County food shelfs back in the dark old days, swallowing my pride because it was my job to provide, and when my labor wasn’t enough, then my willingness to ask would have to suffice. It was hard, but it was made easier by the welcoming attitude of the staff, as well as by their willingness to make distinctions between food for the really needy (basic, locally donated foods bought with donated cash) and the less-in-demand grocery store perishables, and then finally the federal commodities. What also made it easier was, frankly, going to other towns. I simply don’t know if I could have gone to a Cambridge food shelf. It was so much less humiliating to go to Morrisville, and that has nothing to do with their attitude and everything to do with my vanity. It is a big step to go from feeling compassion for one of “them” to actually being one of “them”. I apologize if I sound politically incorrect, but that is how it felt. So I would recommend that food shelves not be in the least bit territorial. If someone lives in another town, there is a reason they go elsewhere, unless of course they just don’t know. One can say “you shouldn’t feel that way” but – I did, and I suspect others might also.

So, what can we do to help our underemployed neighbors? In a nutshell, here are three things I can think of, maybe you have ideas too: be more open to local job creation; buy services locally; and support the local safety net. FPF is a great tool for doing all three, but it’s up to us as individuals and as a community to go the extra mile, as a great man once said.

By the way, more than 40% of Cambridge households are FPF members.

Thank you Front Porch Forum for connecting me with a Forum member who cleaned my gutters and swept my garage roof. So nice to meet a neighbor in the process.

That’s FPF in a nutshell.  Get something checked off your to-do list… and meet a neighbor in the process.  Our aim is to help neighbors connect and build community.  It happens one small exchange at a time… online and face-to-face.

As a friend said recently… “So much of the Internet feels like a fire hose of information, but FPF is like slow-drip irrigation.”  I’m not sure how I feel about being compared to a soaker hose… guess we’ve been called worse.  ;-)

Thanks to the blog’s many regular readers.  Our frequent back-and-forth (mostly off-blog) about the quickly heating up “neighbor conversation” online space is fascinating.  Dozens of start-ups are now aiming to help neighbors connect.  We’re glad for the company.  I invite more of them to contribute to the field by frequently blogging about what they’re learning.  Hosting sustainable neighborly online discussions across many neighborhoods is not trivial!

Many of the pundits who focus on adjacent spaces — hyperlocal journalism, social networking, daily deals, etc. — are slowly waking to the staggering potential of online neighborhoods.  We’ve seen it first hand in our super successful pilot.  Neighbors, local businesses, public officials, nonprofits… they all flock to Front Porch Forum and put it to excellent use.

There’s monster demand across North America for connection to place and neighbors.  The opposite — which too many of us experience now — is untenable… living with a neutered sense of community, being surrounded by strangers for years on end, not knowing what’s going on in the neighborhood, not feeling a sense of ownership of your place.  Ugh.

Here’s to the next five years!

P.S.  What’s with the name Ghost of Midnight?

At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.

“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.

“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.

The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.

By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.

By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell

Garrett Hardin called his famous 1968 essay on shared resources “The Tragedy of the Commons.” He argued that a shared village grazing pasture would tend to get overused and eventually destroyed. But even Hardin later acknowledged that shared common resources did not inevitably have to end in destruction, saying that he should have called his essay “The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons.”

And from Fran Korton’s interview at Shareable…

Fran: It’s interesting that your research is about people learning to cooperate…

Elinor: I have a new book coming out in May entitled Working Together, written with Amy Poteete and Marco Janssen. It is on collective actions in the commons. What we’re talking about is how people work together. We’ve used an immense array of different methods to look at this question “case studies, including my own dissertation and Amy’s work, modeling, experiments, large-scale statistical work. We show how people use multiple methods to work together.

Fran: Many people associate “the commons” with Garrett Hardin’s famous essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.”… What’s the difference between your perspective and Hardin’s?

Elinor: Well, I don’t see the human as hopeless. There’s a general tendency to presume people just act for short-term profit. But anyone who knows about small-town businesses and how people in a community relate to one another realizes that many of those decisions are not just for profit and that humans do try to organize and solve problems.

If you are in a fishery or have a pasture and you know your family’s long-term benefit is that you don’t destroy it, and if you can talk with the other people who use that resource, then you may well figure out rules that fit that local setting and organize to enforce them. But if the community doesn’t have a good way of communicating with each other or the costs of self-organization are too high, then they won’t organize, and there will be failures.

Fran: So, are you saying that Hardin is sometimes right?

Elinor: Yes. People say I disproved him, and I come back and say “No, that’s not right. I’ve not disproved him. I’ve shown that his assertion that common property will always be degraded is wrong.” But he was addressing a problem of considerable significance that we need to take seriously. It’s just that he went too far. He said people could never manage the commons well.

At the Workshop we’ve done experiments where we create an artificial form of common property such as an imaginary fishery or pasture, and we bring people into a lab and have them make decisions about that property. When we don’t allow any communication among the players, then they overharvest [the commons]. But when people can communicate, particularly on a face-to-face basis, and say, “Well, gee, how about if we do this? How about we do that?” Then they can come to an agreement.

That last bit there about communication leading to better community decisions… love it.  It’s so obvious. I guess that’s why it takes a non-economist Nobel Laureate in Economics to explain it to the economists of the world.  And, for what it’s worth, her observation jibes with what we see at Front Porch Forum too.  FPF leads to better communication among neighbors, more face-to-face conversation, and, in many cases, better community decisions.

Congratulations Dr. Ostrom!

Susan Comerford, a longtime community organizer and now associate dean for academic affairs and

Credit: William Duke

research at the University of Vermont’s College of Education and Social Services, calls it “the best community organizing tool that’s come along in the last 30 or 40 years.” To understand its importance, says Comerford (who started posting on the forum the day she needed a recommendation for a carpenter), you have to think about what’s happened in the American economy in recent decades.

“It’s not that people care less about community,” she notes. “It’s that the economy has shifted how much people have to work to keep up their standard of living. You don’t have one of the two partners home during the day making all those social connections, providing some sense of safety to the neighborhood. People have less disposable time than they used to.”

In a world like that, a system that lets you sit down for 10 minutes at the end of the day and learn what’s happened to your neighbors should, in Comerford’s view, earn Wood-Lewis one of those MacArthur “genius” grants.

UPDATE: The media coverage of Bill’s look at FPF is growing.  Check it out here, starting March 1, 2010.

House Concurrent Resolution 235
Congratulating Front Porch Forum on Its 10th Anniversary

Offered by: Representatives Wizowaty of Burlington, Aswad of Burlington, Bissonnette of Winooski, Donovan of Burlington, Frank of Underhill, Head of South Burlington, Heath of Westford, Jerman of Essex, Johnson of South Hero, Krebs of South Hero, Larson of Burlington, Lippert of Hinesburg, Lorber of Burlington, Minter of Waterbury, O’Brien of Richmond, Pugh of South Burlington, Ram of Burlington, Spengler of Colchester, Stevens of Waterbury, Till of Jericho, Waite-Simpson of Essex, Weston of Burlington, Wright of Burlington and Zuckerman of Burlington

Whereas, Front Porch Forum (FFP) has helped thousands of Vermont neighbors connect and build real community through its free, online service, and

Whereas, FPF now hosts 140 online neighborhood forums that blanket all of Chittenden and Grand Isle Counties, plus Starksboro, and

Whereas, more than 17,000 Vermont households subscribe to FPF, including in excess of 40 percent of dozens of neighborhoods and towns, and

Whereas, hundreds of local businesses and public officials use FPF to connect with Vermont customers and constituents, and

Whereas, thousands of Vermonters use FPF to find lost pets, report break-ins, organize neighborhood clean-ups and block parties, give away and sell household items, announce public events, debate local issues, and more, and

Whereas, FPF has been recognized nationally for helping Vermonters lead more civically engaged lives, and

Whereas, FPF looks forward to expanding its service to all Vermont towns, and

Whereas, today, March 30, 2010, marks Front Porch Forum’s 10th anniversary, now therefore be it

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives: That the General Assembly congratulates Front Porch Forum, Inc. on its 10th anniversary and its success in reinvigorating Vermont neighborhoods while building new online communities, and be it further

Resolved: That the Secretary of State be directed to send a copy of this resolution to Michael Wood-Lewis at Front Porch Forum, Inc. in Burlington.