Education

A little update from the underbelly of the Orton Family Foundation BlogFrog: we’re trying to lighten up.

Not quite a newsflash, I know, but critical in a number of ways. Orton Staffers, by and large, come from a land of case studies, research papers, periodicals and publishing houses. We’ve been writing essays all our lives (I’m not promising they were any good, but that’s moot in this case), and while the French word for essay—essayer—means to try, we don’t try out enough stuff on our blog. We don’t experiment enough or test ideas or ask enough questions. In short, we aren’t connecting with you in a way that elicits as much exchange as we’d like.

In the well-meaning spirit of legitimacy and professionalism, we revise and tweak and polish, then re-revise and hyper-tweak and over-polish, until our posts end up...well, too cautious, declarative and earnest and not at all spontaneous, inspired or experimental. We tend to skirt layered, issue-laden topics and avoid controversy altogether. In fact, I’m wondering if we’ve ever gotten around to actually expressing our opinions. Being considerate is one thing; being timid is entirely another.

On the flip side, there’s a fine line (or maybe it’s a fat line that just looks fine from inside our blogging brains) between spontaneous and vapid, experimental and baseless, narcissistic and personal, spirited and plain silly. After all, we’re a foundation with a national reputation and a history of helping small cities and towns build and revitalize vibrant, enduring communities; we’re serious about our work insofar as it really, really matters to us because it also really, really matters to the health, sustainability and livability of this country. So when you come to Cornerstones, you won’t be reading posts about what we did on our family vacations—unless, that is, they happen to inform our work and its impact on the ground.

You will, on the other hand, be finding posts that grapple with the challenges we face each day in our Heart & Soul Project Towns. You’ll find posts that look at land use planning through a new lens, and others that champion examples of truly innovative change. And you’ll also hopefully discover that what we’re really about is disrupting old, defunct, destructive patterns and fostering new, inventive, productive ones. In the land use planning and community development worlds, we’re all about causing a stir. So we’ll try to let a little more of our radical sides show and not worry so much about phrasing and tone. And research. And facts and sources. And what the academics might say or the lawyers or the...(you see what I mean).

So, this is me, brandishing my digital sword from the outer reaches of the blogosphere! (See? I’m even mixing metaphors—frogs...swordplay... Why not? OMG, we’re totally stepping out!) We have made ready for our advance into the messy, interactive, unpredictable yet rewarding world of online discourse.

“Onward!” my boss yells from his office amid stacks of CommunityMatters Conference planning materials.

“Tally ho!” our CEO shouts as he heads out the door on yet another bridge-building venture.

“Giddy-up!” and “Yee-HAW!” and “Right ON!” and “Boo-yah!” and “Let’errrrrrrip!” we howl from our Projects and Communications mounts.

Look for us out there in the Wild West Web, pounding our Orton flag into uncharted soil and scouting for friendlies to join our Heart & Soul mission to save communities across the country from suffering the slow death of chockablock, one-size-fits-all, character-deadening assimilation.

CHAAAAAAAAAARGE!!!!!

Two years ago, our Foundation issued a Request for Projects seeking towns in the Northeast and Rocky Mountain regions to experiment with us in developing a Heart & Soul Community Planning approach to local planning and decision-making. One of the towns applying was Acton, Massachusetts, a community of about 20,000 people about 45 minutes west of Boston. They put together a great application, but for our metropolitan-edge community we chose Golden, Colorado.

Well, a few months ago I was contacted by Justin Hollander of Tufts University, who told me that Acton had been so inspired by the goals of our RFP that they decided to proceed even after not being selected to work with the Foundation (got to love that!). Acton, he continued, had decided to use Second Life as one of its tools to engage its residents and provide hands-on planning opportunities focusing on a key commercial area called Kelley’s Corner.

Photo: eddejesus.wordpress.com

Think about the last planning meeting you attended. Did you notice that practically everyone in the room was between the ages of 40 and 65? And that they were having the same conversation they had five years ago? Here’s an idea for moving the discussion forward—why not involve more young people? It’s not just that the next generation has to live with the decisions we make today, it’s that our decisions will be better for it.

I’ve heard many excuses for why younger generations are not part of the process. They don’t care. They’re hard to reach. The issues are too complex for them to understand. What do they know that we don’t? Funny…these excuses sound a lot like the ones people use for not making more of an effort to include other marginalized populations in a community.

Photo: cityofmanor’s photostream on Flickr

I am a proud resident of a small town. I live in Bethel, Vermont, with approximately 1900 other people and about as many cows, four restaurants, two markets, one school and no stop lights. Most of my neighbors get their news in the local paper and share their views at the dump on Saturday mornings.

Still, Bethel is actually pretty progressive, as far as rural, small town technology goes. We don’t have a Twitter feed or a Facebook page, but the Town does have a basic website, kept up to date with phone numbers for the town offices and PDF files of Select Board minutes.

Still, I can’t help feeling a little tech envy when I read about places that are exploring high-tech ways to open up government, provide people with access to all sorts of municipal data and resources, and make it easier than ever for elected officials to involve and communicate with their citizens:

• NeighborworksAmerica reported on seven new ways that social media is improving neighborhoods: from neighborsforneighbors.org, a Boston non-profit that created social networks for every neighborhood in the City, to thisweknow.org, which makes it easy to compare data between cities.
   
• New York City just concluded its Big Apps competition, making reams of municipal data available to citizens and inviting them to create applications using it. The winners make it easier for New Yorkers to find a subway entrance, rate taxis and learn about their schools.
   
• Cities from New Haven to San Francisco are jumping aboard SeeClickFix or using 311 lines and iPhone apps (like this one in DC), enabling citizens to quickly report issues like potholes and crime hotspots, and enabling governments to quickly take action.

Being the new kid on the Heart & Soul block has been easy in a lot of ways. People are welcoming and open and seem genuinely interested in hearing from me. But in other ways, breaking in to this world has been nearly impossible. How does one gather information about a field that’s so unique that its players frequently don’t even know they’re in the game?

I find myself observing a lot, hesitant to contribute until I know more. I frenetically Google while on conference calls. I browse what I hope are relevant blogs and news articles, always looking for something to pique my interest. Because the Foundation is in the business of connecting the dots, there is no well-worn trail littered with crumbs for me to follow from one innovation to the next.

Photo: © Pedro Meyer, 1997

Just the other night I was casting around for some blog post inspiration. We all work so hard in the trenches and in our heads that sometimes it’s hard to get out of the present and think a little more broadly.

So there I am reading my local weekly paper and out jumps an essay about Plato. That is one of the attributes of living in a college town: professors will share their musings, often “dumbed down” for us mere mortals. In this particular article, Professor Victor Nuovo discusses “Laws,” a less well known work of Plato’s, and reminds us of the role of individuals:

“[I]f the rule of law is to accomplish [peace], it cannot be imposed upon a people from the outside or from above. It must operate within each individual member of society....” (Addison County Independent, March 11, 2010 p 17A).

A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to tour more than a dozen progressive small towns and cities in western Washington state; I met many local officials and personally experienced some of their greatest achievements, primarily in the realm of the built environment. Many projects included mixed-use centers, walkable neighborhood designs that connected people to their downtowns and mixed-income housing developments. Some projects were brand new and others were designed to enhance historic charm and character. During the tour, however, I was struck with the realization that something was lacking: only a few of these places or project sites truly fostered intergenerational needs, and in particular the needs of children.

In 2002, author Dave Eggers and educator Ninive Calegari decided to establish a place for students to go after school to receive writing instruction and finish their homework. Eggers and company found a building to rent located at 826 Valencia Street in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District. The building, however, was zoned for retail, so they had to come up with something to sell in order to occupy the space.

A friend involved with the project mentioned that the inside of the building looked like the hull of a ship and jokingly suggested they sell pirate supplies. Everyone had a good laugh at that, but eventually the idea took hold. Today, in addition to a non-profit tutoring center for students ages 6 to 18, 826 Valencia—named for the building’s location—is also San Francisco’s only independent supplier of equipment for the working buccaneer: eye-patches, peg-legs, hooks, planks and, of course, means to combat scurvy.