Good for Kelly and her funky mailbox-painting project in Huntington, VT. We covered her story last month, and now Seven Days has a lovely piece in this week’s issue by Paula Routly. The slideshow assembled by Cathy Resmer gives a richer sense than the single newsprint photo.
The rural mailbox is a study in contrasts. On the one hand, it’s a personal postal sanctuary fiercely protected by the federal government. On the other, provided the “current resident” owns it, a mailbox can also be a means of self-expression. Along Vermont roadsides, it’s not unusual to see Audubon scenes, American flags and Warren Kimble creations mingling with the standard black, slushy silver, or rusty-red metal loafs.
Kelly O’Brien is taking the mailbox medium one step further: In Huntington, the 38-year-old unemployed carpet saleswoman is turning postal regulation into public art. In the last two months, she’s transformed about 30 drab mailboxes around town into colorful creations. A red mailbox with blue polka dots and funky yellow lettering stands out on the Main Road into Huntington. Further down, a cluster of four cheerily painted boxes makes a statement at the intersection of Blackbird Swale. One of the lids is a landscape that looks like the surrounding area. Is that Camel’s Hump? In arched cursive letters it reads, “Our Road Leads to Heaven.”…
To get the word out, ironically, she resorted to electronic mail. She posted a message on Front Porch Forum, the neighborhood email listserv that is building community connections all over Chittenden County, including in Huntington. “Hi, All — I’d like to paint your mailbox!” O’Brien enthused in her initial communication with her town’s Front Porch members. “You’d be helping me out by letting me paint and take photos for my portfolio . . . and you’ll benefit by getting a one-of-a-kind mailbox.” She added, “If you hate it, I can repaint it to the original black, gray or white.”
About a dozen people responded, and O’Brien went to work — on location.
Kevin Harris writes today…
Adults were three times more likely to play out when they were young, than children are today… released by Play England:
71 per cent of adults played outside in the street or area close to their homes every day when they were children, compared to only 21 per cent of children today.
There has been a decrease over the past thirty years in children’s access to the streets and outdoor areas near their homes. Increasingly their independent mobility is restricted by traffic and fear, which in turn causes them to spend much of their time indoors or at organised activities. The combination of an increase in vehicles on the roads, increased parental anxiety, and restrictions on children’s mobility in the form of child curfews and anti-social behaviour orders has reduced children’s outdoor play opportunities.
The qualitative research reported included focus groups with young people aged between eight and 18. From which comes this scary piece of news:
Ten of the participants said that they never played outside on the streets and areas near their home.
That’s ten out of 64 participants. And in the light of my recent note about the importance of unstructured time, this point is noteworthy:
In all the groups, children and young people said that having the freedom to choose what to do, and where to spend time, particularly in contrast to time spent in school, was very important. Even the youngest children talked about having this freedom and time away from parents and adult supervision.
There’s much more material here
This is all about England, but it sounds not too dissimilar from the ol’ U.S. of A. While I’m tempted to launch into a lengthy piece that starts with “When I was a boy… ” – I’ll instead just add my hearty “hear, hear!”
I don’t have anything beyond intuition to back this up… but I believe that Front Porch Forum works to reverse this unsettling trend. That is, a neighborhood with a thriving online FPF forum becomes a friendlier, more neighborly place, where parents get to know their neighbors over time and thus become more comfortable turning their kids out to play. Maybe I’m wrong… but it’s just this kind of thing that motivates us to make FPF work for more and more communities.
Thanks seem hardly enough when conveyed to UVM Professor Susan Comerford for her remarkable words shared on a PBS.org blog this week…
Front Porch Forum is a postmodern return to citizen democracy which is nurturing the burgeoning hunger for community in our society. Feeding the mind and the soul, the neighborly interchange provides the information necessary to participate intelligently in the democratic process, develop deeper connections with those around us, and provides the support and care that meld individuals who live near one another into neighbors. This may well be the most important advance in community development strategies in decades. Communities around the country will be seeking this opportunity to strengthen their social infrastructure, to foster healthy communities, and to provide the support necessary for their citizens to live vibrant, connected lives. Michael Wood-Lewis deserves a MacArthur Fellowship for an idea as visionary and important as this.
An award of this magnitude would facilitate the hard work and creativity needed to bring the community-building success of our pilot area to other locales across the United States… marvelous to even be mentioned!
I learned more today about a promising event coming this fall to Burlington (October 23-25, 2007)…
COMMUNITYMATTERS07 is the next annual gathering of the Orton Family Foundation and PlaceMatters, where a national network of practitioners comes together to learn, share, inspire and seed innovation in place, collectively elevating the art and science of planning for vibrant, sustainable communities.
Building on the success of the PLACEMATTERS06 conference held last year in Denver, COMMUNITYMATTERS07 will be coming to Burlington, Vermont for a three-day event that will showcase planning technologies and methods, foster discussions and collaboration among citizens and professionals, and improve the way communities make decisions about their futures. COMMUNITYMATTERS07 seeks to support and expand an emerging network of place-based innovators while focusing on challenges particular, but not unique, to the Northeast.
Good stuff and inline with Front Porch Forum‘s focus.
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