On our minds this week...

We left our last coffee shop gathering pondering the following question that perhaps you can help us begin to answer: 
"How do you design stories (or news) within a neighborhood that motivate face to face self organization"

the story we wrote one day at a coffee shop...

we gathered one day at a corner inside a coffee shop and asked a few fellow patrons, neighbors and friends to help us write a story.  This what we came up with:

our story....

the idea for this 'community happening' (starting in the late summer of 2010) was simply the result of a couple of neighbors finally getting creative in order to 'find the time' (more like inspired) to meet up.

we had wanted to share more thoughts about community and public space in our neighborhood but somehow trying to meet at the coffee shop was not working out. we needed a better space to meet, a public place in which we could occupy and invite passers-by into what was a neighborhood conversation after all...

it just so happened that some of the local development projects in our neighborhood had been affected by the economic downturn mid-construction. one controversial project site dubbed the “People’sParking Lot” by neighborhood activists was functioning as a wide-open vacant gravel lot. so we brewed our own coffee & tea, grabbed a folding table & some chairs, and took over a corner of the lot...

there was somehow enough inspiration in all this to have us coming back for more, twice or more times a week for a couple of months, we simply invented new ploys to justify our presence there on the street when people would stop by to ask. "we're conducting a survey"...collecting signatures for a "petition" ("a petition for what?...well, what would you like to petition about?")...

most of the time we sat at our folding table behind an ambiguous sign...drawing, musing, talking with some of our neighbors who stopped by, scheming up various scenarios of public "reclamation of space".  Sometimes there was food and music, and other times we got up and ran around or danced in the empty lot...

Peter Block describes the “essential challenge” for community... to “begin shifting our attention from the problems of community to the POSSIBILITY of community”. we proposed and asked of ourselves, and many of our seemingly aloof neighbors, varying questions regarding the state of the neighborhood and of 'community'. we also exchanged thoughts and ideas around public space, livability, wellness, art, urban design, city planning, local/grass roots organizing, open public conversation, stories, new media, learning, social creativity and innovation, having a voice, developing an idea, 'making', marketplaces, architecture, our future together, sustainability, civic engagement and empowerment...

we also discovered that we (you, me, all of us)are not aloof to neighborhood issues. we just needed a better way to share information and communicate with neighborhood groups and with each other.  we need more public spaces, interesting spaces, spaces and places in which we can share ideas, discover, muse, ponder and be... a community.