Thanks to the work of many in our community, Free Speech TV is bringing its 24/7 independent news, analysis and documentaries to Burlington Telecom. Starting March 1st, we’ll be able to tune in to FSTV on BT’s newest channel (122) on its “basic tier.”

But first, we need to rally to finish the task of making Burlington the first city in the country to offer a fulltime FSTV channel on cable. FSTV has until the end of February to raise a one-time $10,000 to cover its start-up costs.

Here’s some more good news: We raised half the money before we even launched this page.

A group of us founded the Friends of Free Speech TV in Burlington, and we’ve already pledged $5,000 as a Founding Friends Challenge Fund. That means that for every dollar you pledge here, we’ll kick in another dollar to match you. If we can raise just $5,000 by the end of February, FSTV will receive the full $10,000 it needs to launch its new channel in our community.

Have You Signed up for FPF?

Hey Waterbury and Duxbury recipients: Have you found your way to Front Porch Forum yet? Huntington has been using this service for some time now, and it is a real treat to have it finally come to Waterbury and Duxbury. Since the service was turned on in early November, over 200 of your neighbors have joined.

FPF is an excellent way to stay in touch with your neighbors, sell something gathering dust in your garage, find a babysitter, and ask for a hand post-flood. Check it out… FrontPorchForum.com

We’ve also recently expanded to Cabot, East Montpelier and Stowe.  Click here for a map and list of Vermont towns served by FPF.

e-Vermont partner Front Porch Forum provides towns and neighborhoods with a virtual town green and bulletin board. Residents who opt to sign in can easily post notes which get delivered to e-mailboxes throughout the community. Notices about upcoming events, stuff for sale or trade, lost pets, and wildlife sightings mix with discussions about town budgets, local elections, and favorite movies. FPF is also a platform for readers to connect with area businesses and service providers.

Duane Sorrell started his auto repair business in Middlesex last year and reached out on FPF to let people know he was opened. More than 500 of the town’s 700 households are FPF members. Within a couple of days Duane had a dozen new customers. Now people know about a local option for car service and the town has one more successful small business. Meet Duane in this brief interview:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And from Moretown…

The village center of Moretown sits along the usually friendly Mad River. But Tropical Storm Irene swelled it to a torrent, taking houses and bridges in its wake.

Just prior to Irene, this e-Vermont community was slowly building interest in its new town wideFront Porch Forum. Suddenly, it exploded with activity. In a few long days, Moretown residents and public officials shared 300 disaster-related postings among neighbors on FPF. Typically it would take five months to generate that many postings there. Also, even without consistent power or Internet availability in many places, the FPF member count increased by 50%. Indeed, FPF proved so valuable to residents that it was printed each day and posted at Town Hall for those who did not have online access.

In addition to 5-10 daily updates from public officials on FPF, neighbors rallied to help each other directly. Here’s one result shared by a Moretown FPF member…

“We’ve lost half a house but we’ve gained a community. I’ve never experienced being carried through a devastating event by large numbers of friends, neighbors, and complete strangers before. Thank you Moretown and out-of-town volunteers for your heart-breaking generosity.”

There’s no disputing that humans are social animals, although these days we often don’t get enough social interaction. For those fortunate enough to live in communities with close networks of friends, neighbors, and relatives, the benefits to physical and mental health can be astonishing. Most of us intuitively know that having strong social ties are a good thing, but a growing body of research has shown that the correlation between overallmental and physical health and feeling connected with friends, family, and neighbors is much stronger than one would think. The same is true on a community level. Communities with strong social ties often report less crime, more civic engagement, and higher property values, to name a few of the benefits.

But this day in age, it’s difficult for people in many communities to know how to foster that sense of connection. Our time is too often taken up by activities that are contrary to fostering social engagement, including driving, eating alone (and often in our cars), and watching t.v. In the age of Facebook, ironically, Americans report having only two close friends, a drop from three in 1985. And Americans report consistantly that they are less happy–thanks in large part to decreased social capital. Even for folks who recognize the problems with these declines, it can often be difficult to find a resource for bringing folks together.

That’s where a website like Front Porch Forum becomes important… I myself had used FPF only in a work-related capacity, so I was eager to try it out on my own time. After typing in my street address, I was welcomed into the Buell Neighborhood Forum… [it] currently has 559 members, serves 750 households, and has had 777 messages posted since it began.

Each “issue” of FPF posts roughly every three days, with moderators involved in the process. In that way, FPF differs from a service like Craigslist in that it does not consist of anonymous posters publishing information over the internet; rather, it is the full names of people in my community posting information specific to my neighborhood. On my first tour through FPF, I was surprised to see the amount of postings dedicated to civic matters that I otherwise may have been unaware of. I also quickly learned that a meeting was being held—along with a free public dinner—to discuss plans to rebuild a recently burned-down building in my neighborhood.

For all the great qualities of Facebook, with which I can connect to distant friends and acquaintances from a world away, FPF quickly proved its effectiveness at fostering true community engagement. And in a world in which real social connections seem harder to come by, a service like Front Porch Forum may be increasingly important.

And her next posting extends her thinking…

We live in a culture obsessed with health… But what if there’s more to health than just diet and exercise? What if the strength of the communities we inhabit have, perhaps, more to do with our health than any other factor? And what if, even in the face of a high-fat diet and less-than-stellar lifestyle choices, you still find that where you live has more to do with your overall health than anything else?

Such is the case outlined in Malcom Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers… It’s a fascinating book, but for the purpose of this blog post I’m interested primarily in the book’s preface.

In the preface to this book, Gladwell looks at the unique case of Roseto, Pennsylvania, a town that in the late 1950′s came under the scrutiny of Dr. Stewart Wolf. Wolf took notice of an anomaly in the statistics regarding the town’s health: for men over 65, the death rate from heart disease was half that of the rest of the U.S., and while at the time heart attacks were the leading cause of death for men under 55, virtually no male in that age group from Roseto suffered from heart-related problems. And across the board, the death rates from all other causes in Roseto were markedly lower than they should have been. It was a community without suicide, alcoholism, or drug problems. The crime rate was very low. This little town of about 2,000 in Pennsylvania represented a statistical anomaly that flew in the face of the common medicinal thought of the time.

Intrigued, Dr. Wolf got to work studying the people of the town. He examined people across the U.S. hailing from the same region of Italy as Roseto’s residents, and found that whatever made Rosetans special, it wasn’t in their genes. He looked at the food they ate, which consisted mainly of a high-fat diet of pizza, pastas, and Italian pastries, much of it cooked in lard. He looked at their lifestyles and rates of exercise, but those gave no clues; by all accounts the Rosetans lived lifestyles no healthier than their neighbors.

The one factor that seemed to differentiate Roseto’s residents is that they lived in an intensely close-knit community. Having immigrated from the same region of Italy beginning in 1882, the Rosetans built a town largely insular from neighboring communities… In any one house in Roseto, multiple generations of family members lived under the same roof. Neighbors cooked dinners for each other, stopped for long conversations in the streets, and on Sundays attended Mass as a community. During the days the men of the town went to work together in the slate quarries while the women worked in blouse mills. The Rosetans had been successful in transplanting the culture of their native Southern Italy to Eastern Pennyslvania, creating a town that was uniquely supportive of its community members and shielding its residents from the modern mental ailments of loneliness, anxiety, and depression. This appeared to translate into overall physical well-being, despite factors like genetics, diet, and exercise.

This example of an outlier is so intriguing because it truly illustrates the power of community to shape us. In my last blog post, I looked at some of the data demonstrating that Americans are largely less happy than in years past, reporting fewer close friends and residing in less cohesive communities. I looked at how a website like Front Porch Forum works to foster stronger community relations by connecting neighbors and spurring civic engagement. In Vermont, where close-knit communities are more the norm than in many other parts of the country, it is important that we continue to work to make our communities that much stronger. That means supporting local businesses when we can, buying food from our local farmers, and supporting local artists, artisans, musicians, and others in our communities…

 

Thanks to the Patterson Foundation’s New Media Journalism initiative for its support of this event and more.  Janet Coats and Kathleen Majorsky of Patterson focus on FPF on their blog today…

Front Porch Forum (FPF) is an online space that serves small towns and neighborhoods in just about a third of Vermont. Each FPF helps improve Vermont’s local community ecosystem. Hosting these neighborhood conversations leads to face-to-face interaction and ultimately improved community.

When a neighbor posts to the conversation on their local FPF, their name, street name and email address appears in their post.

“Neighbors go from being strangers to actually knowing these people through the conversations,” says Wood-Lewis.

Wood-Lewis and his family moved to Vermont in search of community, but found it difficult to come by through traditional means so they created FPF. It was created to help Wood-Lewis and his family meet the neighbors and understand what was going on around them. Its impact on communities exceeded their expectations, but it is this impact that inspires Wood-Lewis to continue to invest in FPF’s growth.

“We are motivated by the results we see. It has made our neighborhood a better place to live and raise our kids. It’s made our city a better place. It empowers people to do the great things that people do given half a chance to be good neighbors,” says Wood-Lewis.

When Hurricane Irene tore through Vermont at the end of August, FPF played a major role in local disaster relief. People started to self-organize through FPF. Residents would list their needs on FPF and groups of neighbors would gather supplies and make their way to those in need.

“We saw this happen again and again,” says Wood-Lewis, “It’s really powerful.”

More than half of Burlington, VT participates in FPF…  it’s incredibly vibrant and popular. The desire to know the people who live around us and to be plugged into neighborhood news is strong and growing.

This “neighbor conversation” area is a quickly emerging online space with many start-ups and existing dot.coms jumping in. It’s a close cousin to hyperlocal journalism. More here:http://to.pbs.org/oDcZAI

… community and place-based foundations leaders meet with journalism and technology experts… will provide new insights into the changing media landscape and emerging technologies while offering concrete examples of how foundations are helping to fill their community’s information voids…

George Jones, born  200 years ago on this date in Poultney, Vt. was a co-founder of the New York Times.  Jones was noted for his honesty, which he, in part, attributed to his Welsh upbringing, especially tested when he, as publisher in the 1870′s, help to bring to light the corruptness of “Boss” Tweed.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/?scp=1-spot&sq=city%20room&st=cse

This e-VermontFront Porch Forum “social media special” is provided with thanks to David W. Dunlap of The New York Times. The New York Times of 2011 is in the forefront of the debate/discussion of how a traditional daily newspaper stays relevant in today’s online, immediate access to news reality.

 

John Dunn & Linda Collins did not hesitate to come to the rescue this evening, after reading a neighbor’s request for assistance on Front Porch Forum.

“The response was outstanding,” says Teresa Bobel Mazzarese, who had used the Forum earlier in the day to reach out for ideas and assistance. A cat had become stranded in a tree, in her backyard, at least 60 feet up.

John and Linda are experienced rock climbers. Clearly, they are kindhearted neighbors as well. They arrived on the scene around 7 pm. The rescue effort lasted until 8:30. John climbed the tree, thoughtfully calculating every stage of the climb. He then patiently allowed time for the cat to accept him once he had reached her. Meanwhile, Linda secured a pet carrier to the lead for John to hoist up when ready.

Upon returning safely to the ground, an hour and a half later, John humbly pointed out that it was simply a matter of adapting his rock climbing technique to new circumstances. Surely this was no small feat…

A moment of awe, rather than words. Teresa summed it up perfectly as the mission came to a close: “Heroes,” she concluded, “This is evidence that Front Porch Forum works. It is proof that it brings the community together.”