“A post-modern return to citizen democracy”

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.

We introduced the service to residents of Starksboro, Vermont, where our pilot Art & Soul Civic Engagement initiative has been underway for over a year now. The goal of the project is to use storytelling and the arts to engage citizens and implement strategies to protect and steward the Town’s shared goals. I think it’s safe to say that Front Porch Forum has not only increased participation in the project, but it has helped to bridge considerable divides in the community. Only two weeks after FPF became available in Starksboro, more than 100 households out of a total of 670 had subscribed. Today, 56% of the Town’s residents have joined the forum!

As Michael points out in his Huffington Post artice, “People post about lost pets, block parties, car break-ins, plumber recommendations, helping ailing neighbors, local politics, school plays... All ages partake, from seniors in their 80s seeking community support to stay in their homes to teenagers looking for summer jobs. In one rural area, people used FPF to find a pair of spooked horses who jumped their fence, then pitched in to build a better enclosure as a gift to the owners. In an urban neighborhood, residents rallied around a mother who was assaulted in the park, and eventually got the city to improve safety conditions there. And in a different community, a young family asked for a couple volunteers to help move their household into new digs across the street—36 neighbors showed up!”

FPF member and University of Vermont dean Susan Comerford is quoted in that same article. She says, “Front Porch Forum is a post-modern return to citizen democracy...(it) may well be the most important advance in community development strategies in decades.”

She might be right. But the coolest thing about FPF in my book is that it upends the assumed role of the Internet in our lives. It asserts that our online lives don’t have to be distinct from our offline lives—that they can merge in healthy, useful, positive, reciprocal ways. And even better than that...Front Porch Forum encourages us to reconnect with each other in person, tête-à-tête, to have conversations and shake hands and share babysitters and roto-tillers and generally help each other out. It pulls us out of our digital isolation and pushes us back into our front yards and onto the street, out to the park or the playground or the farmer’s market or the local garage to see what’s going on, to remember who we are, and even who we want to be, as parents and friends and citizens. It helps us be neighbors.

How simple and how novel, all at the same time.