Cornerstones Blog

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.

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.

The concept of “slow” is taking on new meaning. Its new use is probably best known in conjunction with the “Slow Food” movement, which is defined in Wikipedia as follows: “Slow Food...strives to preserve traditional and regional cuisine and promotes farming of plants, seeds and livestock characteristic of the local ecosystem.” There are organizations dedicated to spreading the concept, some with an international focus and others with a focus on a particular country, such as Slow Food USA.

Recently, I heard about another variation on this approach, called “Slow Money.” This concept, promoted by the Slow Money Alliance, is described as follows: “Founded by Woody Tasch, a pioneer in merging investing and philanthropy, Slow Money’s mission is to build local and national networks, and develop new financial products and services, dedicated to investing in small food enterprises and local food systems; connecting investors to their local economies; and, building the nurture capital industry.”

Image: soundplusdesign.com

When I woke at 4:57am today in rural Vermont, I realized I had been woken by birdsong. The air was so packed with it you couldn't distinguish one call from the next. There was no starting and stopping; it was full on, full-throated and loud, startlingly so. My two-year-old woke up asking for milk and a spot in my bed. Neither of us fell back asleep.

Lying there in the half-light, I remembered waking up in New York City when I lived there a decade ago and what that sounded like: traffic, traffic, store front shields scraping up for the day, sirens, more traffic—a tinny, grinding, cacophonous din, which sometimes, for reasons I never figured out, became a hum that could sound like surf if you forgot where you were (which was never easy). Heavy snowfall was the only thing capable of muffling the City into, not silence, but a constrained quietude. And for a few hours—if we were lucky…the spell could be broken in minutes—all of Manhattan became a blanketed leviathan, a feverish heart in the chest of a submerging whale, an entombed anthill writ large. That’s when we’d get out our skis and slice right down the center of 2nd Avenue or up Broadway to the sparkling stretches of Central Park bordered on all sides by the city, uprising enormously in all its geometric force and certainty. But it was soft in the middle, and we sluiced along.

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.

For most Denverites, summer weekends involve a Subaru or Toyota, a tent and a two-hour drive to the mountains. Last weekend, I threw my tent in the “way back” of my friend’s Four Runner and headed to South Park, Colorado.

I trust that you’ve all seen an episode or two of South Park—the irreverent adult cartoon that gained infamy as a result of one of the Internet’s first viral videos. But did you know that South Park is indeed an actual region of the Colorado Rockies? Host of a handful of towns that boast a combined population of about 1,500, South Park is also home to several thousand cattle, gold medal trout fishing, fabulous camping and beautiful mountain vistas.

Last Saturday afternoon, we stashed our fishing rods, peeled off our waders and headed to McCall’s bar in Fairplay, Colorado. With a year-round population of 610, Fairplay is the booming metropolis of South Park. What could make us abandon the abundance of rainbow and brown trout just begging to be caught on the Middle Fork of the South Platte, you ask? The answer is simple: USA vs. Ghana.

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.