If Front Porch Forum is useful to you, please take a minute to contribute today. Every October we ask folks to become Supporting Members and today we kick off our 2015 campaign.
Contribute here (credit card or check)
More than 100,000 Vermont households participate on their local FPFs. As you’ve seen, lost pets are found, break-ins are reported to neighbors, electricians are recommended, block parties are organized and so much more. And each exchange among neighbors carries the promise of building community.
If you agree that FPF is something special, then please help keep it strong. We are a Vermont business, hosting FPF in each of the state’s 251 towns. Our staff of 12 work seven days a week to deliver our service. Most of our operating expenses are covered through ad sales to Vermont businesses. Your Supporting Member contributions help cover the rest.
Contributions are voluntary. Any amount you can give brings us closer to our 2015 goal, and makes FPF vibrant in your community. If you value FPF, become a supporting member now and help us reach our $100,000 goal: http://frontporchforum.com/supporting-members
Pay online, or mail a check to:
Front Porch Forum
PO Box 64781
Burlington, VT 05406-4781
Many thanks from the FPF team!
Michael, Nina, Linda, Lynn, Gisele, Suzie, Jonna, Carolyn, Natanya, Wendy, Jodi and Jan
Front Porch Forum
P.S. FPF is not a charity and contributions are not tax deductible.
We’re excited to announce that Front Porch Forum now has 100,000 members across Vermont. More than one-third of the households in the state participate in their local FPFs. Thanks to all who have helped achieve this milestone.
To share FPF with other Vermonters, please send them to FrontPorchForum.com to check it out and sign up.
FPF’s mission is to help neighbors connect and build community. We do that by hosting a statewide network of online neighborhood forums where Vermonters post about lost pets, borrowing ladders, recommending plumbers, sighting moose, reporting break-ins, discussing school budgets, and much more.
From Carol Coletta on the Knight Blog:
Are neighbors vanishing in America? Marc Dunkelman thinks so.
Marc is a fellow in public policy with the Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University and author of “The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community.”
Here are five things you should know from my conversation with Marc and from his book:
1. The General Social Survey reports that the percentage of Americans who say they have eaten a meal with their family and with people outside their neighborhood has risen. But the percentage of Americans who say they have eaten with someone in their neighborhood has plummeted.
2. Being “neighborly” today means that you should leave people alone, rather than engage.
3. Thanks to technology, the opportunity to invest in relationships has vastly expanded. However, we are using tech to invest in a limited set of relationships generally, with people who share our interests and our point of view.
4. The way you drive new ideas in the workplace is to force together people with different perspectives, fields of expertise and ideas. But we haven’t applied that concept to the way we view communities. We no longer have conversations with people with different points of view because we’ve lost “middle-ring” relationships.
5. The township has been the architecture of community throughout American history. People with different points of view couldn’t avoid each other. But we are moving to an architecture of networks where there are intense nodes of inner-ring relationships and that connect to a wider range of people who share our interests.
Listen to my conversation with Marc here. And sign up for the “Knight Cities” newsletter to get alerts as soon as new conversations are posted.
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