Category Archives: social capital
Be like the neighbors… then beat them…
Thanks to #BTV #VT ECHO‘s Molly Loomis for sharing this Washington Post article by David A. Fahrenthold…
To a psychologist, climate change looks as if it was designed to be ignored. It is a global problem, with no obvious villains and no one-step solutions, whose worst effects seem as if they’ll befall somebody else at some other time. In short, if someone set out to draw up a problem that people would not care about, one expert on human behavior said, it would look exactly like climate change…
One U.S. researcher thought television is to blame: All those TV ads have made Americans more focused on their own wants, she theorized, and less likely to care about the long-term good.
The obstacles to progress… there’s a sense that this is a problem for somebody else or some other time… the science can be confusing… humankind’s deep-seated love for the status quo and willingness to defend it… humans can fret about only so many things at once.
Psychological researchers say one possible way to overcome all these obstacles is to frame the changes needed to curb carbon emissions as “saving” the American way of life, instead of changing it. Another is to pair warnings about the climate with concrete suggestions about what to do, so people can act instead of just stewing in worry.
Another is to tap into two powerful human impulses: to be like one’s neighbors and then to beat them at something.
In one small study around San Diego in 2007, researchers hung four fliers on doorknobs. One told homeowners that they should conserve energy because it helped the environment. One said saving energy was socially responsible. One said that it saved money. The fourth said that the majority of neighbors in the community were doing it.
The researchers waited and then read the meters. The houses with the fourth flier showed the most change.
“Simply urging people — or telling them that it’s a good idea to recycle or conserve energy — is the same as nothing,” said Robert Cialdini, a professor at Arizona State University who worked on the study.
The best example of climate psychology in action might be programs run by the Arlington energy efficiency software company Opower. In 12 areas around the country, the firm sends mailings to utility customers. The sheets compare each customer’s power usage to that of neighbors with similar houses and offer tips for catching up, such as turning off lights and lowering the temperature settings of water heaters.
It works, the company says, lowering electricity usage by 2 percent in several test cases. The fliers never say a word about climate change.
Fascinating. Our experience with Front Porch Forum on a variety of topics jibes with this… that is, best pitch tends to be… join your neighbors vs. join because it’s good for you or your community or your wallet or the environment (all true by the way!). And getting the competitive juices flowing appeals to many.
Bringing Kids Back To The Commons
[We welcome a guest post today from Laura Grace Weldon. Take it away, Laura… ]
Bringing Kids Back To The Commons
“All real living is meeting.” -Martin Buber
Surely my baby was as good as a dog. I’d read that nursing home residents benefitted enormously from contact with therapy dogs. During and after dog visits these elders were more alert and in better moods. So I figured, why not bring my baby to a nursing home?
I contacted the nursing home around the corner. The administrator was enthusiastic. Then I talked my Le Leche League friends into forming a nursing home-based playgroup for our infants and toddlers. They were somewhat wary, but agreed to give it a try. Finally I got a local store to donate a carpet remnant for our little ones to crawl and play on. Between visits, the nursing home could roll it up for storage. We were ready.
We met regularly at that nursing home for several years. Our babies grew into toddlers, the elders became our friends. Residents’ families and staff members often told us that our visits stimulated memories, generated activity, even inspired people who were mostly mute to say a few words. We were awed. Something as simple as our presence there, sitting on the carpet playing with our children, made a difference to people whose once full lives were now constricted. We benefitted too. We learned the value of advice given by people older than our grandparents. And we noticed how completely our toddlers accepted the physical and mental differences around them with natural grace.
I’m still not sure why the very old and young are kept apart from life on the commons. Vital and engaged communities are made up of all ages. Chances are children have fewer opportunities to take an active part than almost any adult. This shortchanges everyone.
Throughout history, the young of our species have learned by getting involved. Children long to take on real responsibilities and make useful contributions. This is how they advance in skill and maturity. That is, unless we restrict them to child-centered activities.
Young people are also drawn to seek mentors. They want to see how all sorts of people handle crises, start businesses, make repairs, settle disputes, and stay in love. But today’s young people are largely kept from meaningful engagement with the wider community. They’re segregated by age not only in day care and school but also in most spheres of recreation, religion, and enrichment. When we keep kids from purposeful and interesting involvement with people of all ages they are pushed to find satisfaction in other (often less beneficial) ways. Meanwhile, our communities are deprived of their youthful energy and innovative outlook.
It doesn’t have to be that way. There are ways to reconnect children with our communities.
- Involve children by giving them real input and responsibility in civic groups, churches, co-ops, CSA’s, arts organizations, clubs, and neighborhood organizations. What about a child who is a dedicated rock enthusiast but the local lapidary club only accepts adult members? Propose a joint adult/child membership, giving that child the same (age factored) opportunities to build social capital in the club. A similar approach can be taken with organizations that refuse to take youthful volunteers. Offer to give your time in partnership with the child, a two-for-one volunteer bargain. Adult advocates are often necessary to pave the way for genuine youth involvement in many groups.
- Give children contact with the workaday world. They need to know people with a range of hobbies and careers. Seek out those who are passionate about chemistry, bird watching, farming, the Civil War, engineering, astronomy, bagpipes, geology, blacksmithing, wood carving, drumming, well, you get the idea. Something vital is transmitted when one person’s enthusiasm sets off a spark of interest in a child. We’re rarely turned down when we ask to learn from others. People who love what they do can’t help but inspire kids and, they often tell me, the kids reignite their hope for the future of their work.
- Help local businesses tune in to children’s interests. For example, a bakery might hang children’s art on the walls, make meeting space available for a kids’ chess club, host Invent A Cookie contests, open the kitchen for tours, offer apprenticeships to aspiring young pastry chefs, teach parent-child baking classes, invite speakers to explain the science of yeast and flour, give cupcakes as prizes for youth community volunteer hours, etc. Businesses that are truly engaged in this way inspire loyal customers, they also enliven the community.
- Create age-bridging partnerships, as we did with babies and nursing home residents. Non-profit organizations are great places to start. One successful program called Girlfriend Circle started due to complaints. A group of women at a senior center often told a volunteer that they had no hope for the future because children “nowadays” are rude. The volunteer offered to set up a tea party for the ladies that included her daughters and their friends. At that first event the girls were seated between their older hostesses. Everyone enjoyed a lesson in napkin origami. Then they took part in a Q&A to learn about one another. After sharing refreshments both age groups were eager to meet again. The Girlfriend Circle met bi-monthly for several years, finding their friendships instructive and rewarding.
- Include young people in civic affairs, giving them genuine input into programs and policies. This works in Hampton, Virginia. Young people take leadership roles by holding conferences and open forums, advising municipal divisions, and helping to run the Hampton Youth Teen Center. City administration also includes a Youth Commission, with 24 youth commissioners, 3 youth planners, and one youth secretary–all high school age.
This comes full circle for me, right back to dogs and volunteering. A boy who had been a member of the play group we held at the nursing home talked his family into raising puppies to be trained as service dogs. By the time he was 12 years old, this boy gave promotional talks about this program to clubs and schools. I went to see him. He started off with some anecdotes about exasperating puppies. Then he went on to describe the generosity and hope his family felt each time they attended graduation ceremonies for fully trained dogs, ready to serve. I tend to think community involvement is a path to wholeness. I’m convinced it has a lot to do with his smile.
Laura Grace Weldon is a farmer and writer in Ohio. She’s the author of Free Range Learning: How Homeschooling Changes Everything. Connect with her at www.lauragraceweldon.com
Neighborhood Sites Can Awaken Community Involvement
[This posting originally appeared on PBS MediaShift/IdeaLab and Huffington Post.]
“When I was first on my own I used to bemoan that my fellow renters could hardly be bothered to return a wave but someone kept stealing my newspaper…,” wrote author Laura Grace Weldon in a recent blog post, What Makes A Street Into A Neighborhood? “Then we moved to a little house. It was silly how hard it was to meet the neighbors. They’d wave but that’s about it.”
Along the same lines, Sarah Byrnes wrote in YES! Magazine that “In the past, neighbors knew each other and engaged more naturally in mutual aid, sharing common resources and helping those in need. Nowadays, our mutual aid muscles are out of shape and pretty flabby.”
The National Conference on Citizenship’s Civic Health Index has attempted to bring science into the discussion by measuring things like the percent of people in a place who discuss politics with family and friends (44 percent in Vermont, for example). They found that 9 percent of Americans work with neighbors to improve the community, and 16 percent exchange favors with neighbors a few times a week.
Local Sites Drive Engagement
In their new book, The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, John McKnight and Peter Block provide strategy and tactics culled from decades of community organizing. The book is chock full of hands-on, face-to-face ideas for pulling neighbors together. The Internet gets a mention, but it should get more.
A recent study from the U.K. by Hugh Flouch and Kevin Harris found incredible civic engagement impact from neighborhood-focused websites. Among the findings reported by residents who use these websites:
- 95 percent feel more informed about the neighborhood
- 92 percent feel useful information gets shared efficiently
- 82 percent feel people pull together to improve the neighborhood
- 69 percent feel an increased sense of belonging within the neighborhood
How is this possible? I’m guessing that the sites studied offer highly relevant (that is, very local) content, don’t waste people’s time, and emphasize relationships and communication among “participants” over simply feeding news to passive “readers.” These sites likely move away from social media’s 90:9:1 principal, which posits that 90 percent of visitors are lurkers, 9 percent pitch in a little, and 1 percent create the vast majority of a site’s content.
Sometimes even the 1 percent of the content that appears to be user-generated is actually supplied by paid contributors, such as the recent case with Yell.
Front Porch Forum
I see a different pattern with our Knight News Challenge-supported Front Porch Forum. We host a pilot regional network of online neighborhood forums in Vermont with the simple mission of helping neighbors connect and get involved.
In one rural town, we found that half of the community had subscribed to FPF after one year and, remarkably, 66 percent had posted. Instead of 90:9:1, we saw a ratio closer to 34:44:22. In another study in Burlington, Vt., where half of the city subscribes to FPF, 90 percent reported that their local civic engagement had increased due to this online service.
Finding quality, timely and accessible local information is a daunting task in our current environment, with traditional media’s convulsions and new media’s fits and starts. But that’s only half the battle. An informed yet isolated and disconnected populace does not make a democracy. We need more efforts like those covered in the U.K. study above that get people connected to neighbors and involved in the places where they live.
That’s our mission at Front Porch Forum and we’re excited to find growing interest in turning online words into offline local actions. Please share examples in the comments.
7 Ways to Make your Neighborhood a Better Place
Kevin Harris offers this U.K. gem on building community within a neighborhood. Same goes most places…
Here’s a tidy post from my friend Liz Ixer over on Harringay Online, rehashing this o.p. and suggesting seven ways to make your neighbourhood a better place. Liz makes the principles locally pertinent and weaves-in the role of the neighbourhood online network.
I see lists like this quite often, this one has the virtue of simple practicality and relative brevity. The headings are:
- Plant something
- Pick up litter
- Get to know your neighbours
- Find out who your government/local representatives are
- If you see something, say something
- Shop locally
- Go for a walk.
And credit to the original poster, Sarah Goodyear, who makes this point under the heading ‘Get to know your neighbours’:
‘If anything bad happens – a blackout, a flood, or worse – these are the people you need to know. It starts with hello.’
Neighborhoods much less important as social units
Economist Juliet B. Schor writes in her new book, Plentitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, about the decline of social capital in the United States during the past few decades…
Neighborhoods have become much less important as social units, with people much less likely to interact with, or even know, their neighbors… Online community is growing and filling in some of the gap. But it doesn’t replicate all the functions of face-to-face interaction. (Full quote here… see “Economies of Reciprocity.”)
Schor discusses competing theories that may explain this… and looks at people, projects and places pushing back on this troubling trend. A compelling read.
#VT’s new Lt. Gov. pushes Civic Engagement
New Vermont Lt. Governor Phil Scott (Rep.) was sworn in yesterday and gave a speech centered on civic engagement. I invite our new Lt. Gov. to see how Front Porch Forum is helping Vermont neighbors connect and get involved locally… e-Vermont too. Some choice quotes…
… as many of you know, 46 percent of registered voters didn’t vote in November. That’s 209,000 Vermonters whose only choice on November 2 was not to show up. They decided it wasn’t worth it, or it didn’t matter, or it wouldn’t do any good, to make their voice heard. My experience shows that’s just not the case… I don’t think any of us fully realized until November 2 what that frustration had turned into; it turned into 209,000 people who had apparently given up… Civic involvement isn’t something that’s only relevant on even-numbered years.
All of us here in the Legislature need to reach out to those folks and welcome them in, even when we might not agree with their views. We need to open our doors. In order to live up to the intentions and the expectations of our accessible government, we ourselves need to be more accessible. That will mean different things for each of us. For me, that means literally opening my office door downstairs a morning or two a week and inviting you in for coffee and conversation. It means opening my virtual doors…
When I challenge Vermonters to get involved, I’m not just talking about the work we do in Montpelier. Because I really believe we all want to help each other; sometimes we just need to know how… one theme that I’ve stressed… is self-reliance, and its partner, volunteerism. In my mind, those are two sides of the same coin. Being self-reliant doesn’t just mean looking after yourself, although that’s important… But self-reliance also means looking after our neighbors, and giving them the support they may need to get to the next step in their lives.
That has a lot of implications.
- That means buying local, and supporting the merchants on Main Street instead of the website in California.
- That means helping Vermont’s manufacturers to identify suppliers and trading partners who are here within our borders or close by in our region.
- That means making it easier and more affordable for more of us to eat local food, supporting our farmers, reducing transportation costs, and getting fresher and healthier things to eat.
- That means investing in energy policies that help us become more independent.
Personally, I suspect that a great deal of the collective frustration that caused those 209,000 people to stay home on November 2 was the sense that our elected officials and candidates kept talking about the goals — creating jobs, jump-starting the economy, and helping our most vulnerable — but didn’t talk enough about how we would get there. Buying local and encouraging innovative local partnerships are part of my vision for how we do it…
Our challenge in Montpelier is to come up with solutions that will strengthen Vermont. Your challenge is to come up with solutions that will help your neighbor and strengthen your community. If we all work together, we will strengthen the legacy of the state that we love to call home.
Is your neighborhood a community?
What a delightful portrait of a neighborhood living in community, by Laura Grace Weldon in Ohio…
What makes a neighborhood? Sometimes that’s hard to figure out.
I’ve lived in a number of places. Not all of them seemed like neighborhoods. When I was first on my own I used to bemoan that my fellow renters could hardly be bothered to return a wave but someone kept stealing my newspaper…
Then we moved to a little house. It was silly how hard it was to meet the neighbors. They’d wave but that’s about it. It took nearly a year to meet the older couple across the street… Finally I baked a loaf of bread, knocked on their door and said I was sorry we hadn’t gotten a chance to meet. They turned out to be lovely people. They still write long chatty updates to me years after we moved away.
I began to understand that it takes effort to make a neighborhood. So I greeted everyone who moved onto our street with homemade goodies. I shared produce from my garden and offered to help others in any way I could. I also started inviting people over. In the fall we had bike parades where the kids spent a happy hour or so decorating their tricycles, scooters, and bikes to ride around the neighborhood in a grand procession before coming back to our house for a picnic. We had cookouts, Halloween parties, and Christmas caroling parties. We met up for working get-togethers such as picking apples and making applesauce.
The major neighborhood bonding events were our summer pig pen parties… [read the full post]
This jibes with what we see in dozens of neighborhoods where Front Porch Forum is used. It takes effort to breathe community into a neighborhood. FPF can help make it easier… and can help sustain those connections over time.
About Blog
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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