Great article in the Washington Post today by Ann Cameron Siegal, titled “From Nod and Wave to Know and Share: How to Spark A Neighborly Connection.” Here’s a taste…
Some people dream of living in communities where children pop in and out of one another’s houses, where adults gather on front porches for riveting conversations, where gardeners trade bounty over back fences.
Others don’t want that much closeness.
But most of us would like more than just a nodding acquaintance with neighbors.
What seems to have been easy and natural decades ago, when mothers were home and kids played outside for hours, takes a bit more effort today. That’s especially true when there’s no organization such as a homeowners association to get things started.
Sure, we’re all busy, but other factors can hinder neighborliness.
People drive into their garages, close the door automatically, then proceed inside.
Some houses are set back from the street, with only long driveways bridging the gap. Others sit along busy streets with no sidewalks, so strolling the neighborhood is not an option.
And as we come and go, we are often focused more on hand-held electronic devices than on our surroundings.
This is what Front Porch Forum is all about.
See America’s Heart & Soul at Palace 9 in South Burlington, VT, thru April 27. If enough Vermonters watch this documentary portrait of ordinary people doing extraordinary things (children free), then it will be released nationally! This movie shares much in common with Front Porch Forum… people pulling together to accomplish so much important work.
From the Local Democracy blog in the U.K…
There’s a really good, detailed bit of reporting here from Friday’s Guardian about the near-collapse of local newspapers in some areas.
The starting point that Stephen Moss chose was my old local paper when I was young – The Long Eaton Advertiser.
This bit stood out for me:
“For the older generation, these things matter. “They want to know who’s passed away,” says the barman at the Corner Pin down the road, “and to check it’s not them.” But the younger generation don’t much care. Carl and Katrina Smith, a married couple in their mid-30s, not only didn’t know the paper had closed; they didn’t even know its name – and they were born nearby and have lived in the town most of their lives. They did, though, occasionally buy the Nottingham Evening Post – mainly for the jobs. For this generation, Long Eaton as a place has almost ceased to exist, lost in a more amorphous Nottingham-Derby conurbation.
“It’s only the older people who think of communities now,” says Carl. “For us it’s more a place to live than a community.” He was an electrician’s mate and worked all over the country (until he was laid off two months ago – people are as vulnerable as papers in the slump); Katrina works in Leicester. Long Eaton is a dormitory for them; they rent a house and say they have no idea who their neighbours are.”
That’s a problem. Front Porch Forum and other efforts are part of a solution.
Friend and colleague Linda Gionti is reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, Outliers. She shared this with me…
It’s about a phenomenon discovered in Roseto, Pennsylvania in the 1950’s. It was a town made up of transplants from Roseto, Italy. One physician noted that he rarely saw heart disease in anyone under 65 from Roseto. Another doctor got curious about this, because that was virtually unheard of–this was the time before cholesterol-lowering drugs and heart attacks were an epidemic in the US. He studied the entire population of Roseto. They thought perhaps it was because they brought their Mediterranean diet with them but no, the Rosetans had adopted American eating habits and had problems with obesity. So they started to look at Roseto itself.
“They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town’s social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under two thousand people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.”
“In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.”
… “Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were–on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.”
Good to think that our work with Front Porch Forum is helping people stay healthy!
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