I’ll be leading a session called Jumpstart your Neighborhood as part of the annual HealthSource Community Education Series organized by Fletcher Allen Health Care and the University of Vermont.
Wednesday, September 19, 7 – 8 p.m.
Jumpstart Your Neighborhood
Michael Wood-Lewis
Co-Founder Front Porch Forum
Common sense and a growing body of research tell us that well-connected neighborhoods are friendlier places to live, with less crime, healthier residents, higher property values, and better service from local government and utilities. Front Porch Forum, a new online service, is helping people in Chittenden County build community at the neighborhood level. Learn the secrets of successful neighborhoods and jumpstart your neighborhood forum into gear. Plenty of time for questions.
This series is free and intended for the general public. Pre-registration is required… call 802-847-2278 (location within Chittenden County, Vermont, and directions provided when you call).
Also, I’ll be leading a workshop (Virtual Neighborhood: Building Local Community Online) at Orton Family Foundation’s CommunityMatters07 conference on Burlington’s waterfront Oct. 23. I just heard that people are registering now, so it looks like it should be a good turnout for this national event.
I’m looking forward to both sessions and encourage those with valuable experience, basic and advanced questions, and good ideas to come and share.
Hard to believe that Front Porch Forum was launched one year ago this month! The response to this local start-up (focused on its initial pilot area of greater Burlington, VT) has been wonderful and overwhelming. What a privilege to work on this effort with the likes of…
Moving forward, our goals are simple and challenging…
So thanks to each FPF member! And please post messages to your neighborhood forum and encourage those around you to sign up at FrontPorchForum.com Here comes autumn! -Michael and Valerie
Just found this article by Robert Putnam, PhD, of Bowling Alone fame.
E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century
Robert D. Putnam (2007)
The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture
Scandinavian Political Studies 30 (2), 137–174.
doi:10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x
Volume 30 Issue 2 Page 137-174, June 2007Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration. In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.
Jason Fry, in reviewing FloorPlanner.com in the Wall Street Journal, concludes with…
The Net makes exploring the world and engaging with it easy in a way we’re only just getting used to. Within a few keystrokes, you can be digging into the news, indulging your curiosity, or foundering in an obsession or addiction. Practically speaking, you can communicate with most anyone you wish whenever you wish. And you can do so at a remove — step away from the PC, or just hit the back button, and your engagement ends.
That remove can be a wonderful thing. It lets us indulge our curiosity almost as quickly as we can think, makes it easy to drop a line to someone we might not feel like we have time to call on the phone and allows us to be part of a community that may be too diffuse for real-world interaction.
The danger is that interacting at a remove can come to seem preferable to the messiness of the real world, where a greater commitment is required and interaction demands more of ourselves than it does in our compartmentalized worlds of browsers and digital personas…
David Weinberger pointed out this passage in his blog posting today, and talks about the value of “what if-ing” via the web. My first thoughts go a different way… Some would argue that too many people are checking out of their local reality to spend time in virtual worlds online, television fantasy and the like. It’s one thing that makes Front Porch Forum such a different experience for people… FPF draws you into your local scene… people become more involved with the neighbors and community around them through the service.
Julia Lerman touched on this when she rates FPF vs. Facebook and the like from her global software development perspective.
Two of Burlington’s Neighborhood Planning Assemblies are now online…
All of the NPA Steering Committee members deserve thanks from the citizens of Burlington for the volunteer work they do on our behalf. About 25 of these good folks also participate on their neighborhood’s Front Porch Forum and have access to all of the neighborhood forums in their ward.
Kudos in particular to Basil Vansuch (Ward 5) and Lea Terhune (Wards 4 and 7) for creating these NPA blogs and thanks for mentioning Front Porch Forum on them.
“Neighborhood” seems to be heating up in the online world. Every week brings word of some new service aimed at the neighborhood level. Here’s the latest to come to my attention… Nayburz in Denver.
The site offers forums, classifieds, restaurant menus, etc. What seems different is the ability to define your geographic “bubble” on the fly across these different functions. This may prove an appealing approach for web-centric folks.
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