Neighborhood White Pages. Fascinating stuff. Type in your address and see your neighbors’ names. While it’s a little weak on renters–and it seems to provide quite formal versions of your neighbors’ names–it’s pretty up-to-date, and I can see this being helpful for when you just don’t remember that neighbor’s name and you’d like to say hi.
Yet another training in asset-based community development, coming up on February 24 and 25 in Minneapolis…
Thanks to the Communities First Association!
Can anyone go?
February 2012: ABCD Training in Minneapolis, MN « Communities First Association.
UPDATE: When I look today at this post of two days ago, I’m struck by its passive-aggressive tone. I must have been feeling pretty frustrated! Sorry, Tait, and The Line…
When I think about it today, my biggest question has become: How do I learn to focus and avoid burnout? Future blog there, I’m sure…
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In Frogtown, a GIS map helps make a neighborhood group more efficient. –From The Line, a local e-zine
I must admit, when I read the last line from Tait Danielson-Castillo, I got a little miffed: “We’re 90 percent sure that nobody else has used [the technology] this way,” he says. “No one else we know is using this on the community level.”
I was using Google Maps in Frogtown back in the summer of 2009 to track various agencies, gifts, prayer needs, etc. when St. Paul Fellowship Church was exploring the formation of a Community Development Corporation.
Further, LINC-Twin Cities has a fantastic community map of Frogtown that tracks gifts, associations, and agencies with C-Camp mapping software from the Communities First Association.
…Not to mention our little effort brewing over here on the Bluff!
I think it’s fantastic what Frogtown Neigborhood Association is doing. And I hope that Tait will be able to share how he mobilized his staff and volunteers to make this effort work. But I’m disheartened that his comments shows just how DISconnected we connectors really are.
The event I’ve wanted in my hometown for awhile… Jody Kretzmann in St. Paul.
I first got to know Kretzmann and compatriot John McKnight through a series of web-based instructional videos from the ABCD Institute. Then my friend Bri and I were sent by my church, Imago Dei, to the ABCD Institute’s weekend intensive conference in Chicago. It was life-changing. If you have $15, cancel your plans and go. If you don’t have $15, ask me for money so you can go.
Welcome to my little blog. As I prepare to engage my neighbors to think about one another’s giftedness, it occurs to me that I must communicate why. I often entertain questions like:
John Soleil over at The Abundant Community says that
Our greatest leadership challenge today is confronting the reality that our communities have fallen apart and social connections exist mostly online. We do not know our neighbors. We eat fast food alone in our cars next to other people eating alone in their cars. We pay people to care for our children. We pay people to care for our elders. We pay people to cook our meals and mow our lawns. We pay people to educate our children until they are old enough for us to send them away where we pay other people for “higher education,” removing our students and their talents completely from our community.
Our communities are now collections of individuals structuring their lives in every way possible to avoid contact with other people.
I would argue that what Dayton’s Bluff needs most is connection. And the only way to build connection is also the hard way: To talk to our neighbors.
In our consumer culture, we’ve been taught to see problems first, rather than opportunities; we’re “solvers of problems.” That’s not always a bad thing: I’m glad someone viewed cancer as a problem that needed solving. However, we often apply that same mentality to our neighbors…to people. Here’s a visual:
|
NEEDS |
ASSETS |
| Action requires highlighting needs and deficiencies | Action requires engagement of the marginalized, drawing them back into the community where they can offer their gifts |
| Builds a perception that only outside agencies and experts can help | Builds a perception that we’re all capable of supporting one another and knowing what our community needs |
| Is about survival, at its best | Is about people’s dreams, passions, and gifts |
| People = Clients and Consumers | People = Neighbors and Producers |
So where are you? Are you being seen for your assets or your deficiencies? What about your neighbor? Consider the opportunities we waste when we only see deficiencies. While this approach might not directly solve our neighborhood’s problems, it just might help create a community that will generate solutions as a byproduct of joyful, life-giving endeavors that make us glad we live here.
Next time: More on the personal side of “gifts based” thinking.
A Thread of Connection 