Examples / Models

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!!!!!

Michael Wood-Lewis’s recent article on The Huffington Post highlights the great strides that Front Porch Forum (FPF) has taken since he launched it with his wife, Valerie, in 2006. In this article, Michael crystalizes the great irony of the Information Age: “In an era where national and global information is broadly available online, it seems that few of us know our neighbors and what's going on down the street.” Ain’t it the truth.

Front Porch Forum’s goal dovetails well with the Foundation’s—to help small cities and towns navigate growth and change while enhancing what they value most. FPF does just this, but on a neighbor-to-neighbor scale; residents can share announcements about key local meetings and events, encourage participation in projects, or simply post items they want to buy or sell—all via their email inboxes. Forum members are always surprised what they learn about people they’ve lived next door to for years.

I’ve attended leadership classes and listened to my most empathic friends explain that a critical element of all successful collaboration is finding middle ground or meeting people part way. No kidding. They also tell me earnestly that neither reasonable discourse nor clearly stated expectations nor chest thumping yield maximum results. I appreciate their good intentions, but that’s about as useful as being reminded I need the “right tool for the job.” Platitudes aren’t the correct tool for any job. What I’d really like is a trail map, however crude, that reveals the hallowed “middle ground.”

A full-on map is probably asking too much. So how about some waypoints? Those you can find. For example, it turns out that a person's perspective about time will influence their choices and behavior. In a May 2010 presentation to the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University, explains that perspectives on time can shape an entire nation. How people organize personal experiences, their perspectives about how long things last, and pace, among other factors, influence whether people are future oriented, past oriented or present oriented. Dr. Zimbardo suggests “many of life’s puzzles” and even conflict “can be solved by understanding your perspective of time and that of others.”

From within the soft body of a squid emerges a hard tooth-like beak, as described in this report from the journal Science. This beak enables the squid to eat mollusks and is apparently one of the toughest organic materials around, and yet it’s somehow merged with what the report calls the squid’s “soft buccal envelope”—the soft, fleshy part of the creature. How does this work? How does something so sharp and pointy connect to something so squishy? It turns out there’s no specific place where the hard part ends and the soft part begins; rather, the beak is composed of materials that exhibit a gradient from hard to soft. It is this essential adaptation that enables the squid to eat what it needs to survive.

Many cities and towns are looking to Form Based Codes (FBC) as a way to combat the woes enabled by traditional single use zoning (e.g. the loss of historic neighborhoods, sprawling development patterns, increasing reliance on the automobile, to name a few). In a nutshell, FBC regulates how a building relates to its surrounding environment and less so on the building’s actual use (I’m oversimplifying here…for a better definition check out the Form Based Code Institute).

Many great communities share a particular DNA—the scale of the buildings, the width of the streets, the mix of uses, etc. Just as slight variations in DNA result in different people, slight variations in land use regulations can lead to different places. These differences can be essential to retaining what makes our cities and towns unique.

Image: Joyce Geleynse

I am encouraged right now. I’m wrapping up my reading of Stick Your Neck Out: A Street-Smart Guide to Creating Change in Your Community and Beyond by John Graham, President of The Giraffe Heroes Project. This book has lots of inspiring stories about individuals taking risks to make a difference in their communities, and it provides some concrete tips on beginning and sustaining these efforts. It’s an easy read that helps to fuel the possibilities.

I’m also a regular reader of Rich Harwood’s blog and appreciate his regular acknowledgements of individuals making a difference. He often takes popular culture or nationally reported incidences and finds the golden nugget or the silver lining, gently but cogently urging us to work from the better place within. And I watch with admiration as Steve Clift of eDemocracy and Matt Leighninger of Deliberative Democracy work away to foment change at a collective level.

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.

The Foundation recently held a convening in Seattle seeking input on the physical characteristics or manifestations of communities intent on articulating, acting on and stewarding their heart and soul. At the Foundation, we call this process “Heart & Soul Community Planning.” A couple interesting aspects of the conversation really jumped out at me.

The first was a statement by leading architect Mark Hinshaw, observing that how a community comes together and how it engages or interacts is as, if not more, important than the physical buildings or the environment. Second, there was strong agreement over the importance of authentic, diverse and continuing engagement of citizens in fostering and/or perpetuating a vibrant community. A few people even offered specific essential ingredients for successful communities.