Ghost of Midnight
… about neighbors, community and Front Porch Forum
Helping neighbors in need… past and present
#BTV #VT – Great point from Joan in Burlington’s Lakeside neighborhood today…
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!
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Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more
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Very interesting. Haven’t written here for a while, but, post-PhD, I’m mulling over FPF-style projects in the UK – and this sort of thing is exactly the kind of benefit I’m curious to find more about.
On a related note: have any FPF communities come up with effective ways of including non-interwebbed neighbours? That would probably include a lot of the older age bracket. Musing about that, I thought a printed newsletter digest would work – whether delivered by a neighbour or actually automatically posted via a central server.
Hi Dan. I’ve heard many times from various FPF members that they share their neighborhood news with non-online neighbors via spoken word or by printing out their most recent FPF neighborhood e-newsletter and walking it next door. Some have regularly posted printed copies on bulletin boards or in a notebook at a corner store or local library.
More broadly, we’ve seen that when we reach a certain saturation point in a neighborhood, those folks not signed up for FPF still benefit via the word-of-mouth AND the many daily real-world outcomes… block parties organized via FPF, garden plant swaps, neighborhood watches, community meetings about potholes, etc.
FPF is designed to benefit an entire neighborhood rather than an individual. Most of its value happens off-line.