[Recently] I was in Las Vegas where I discovered a community – once on top of the world – fighting to come back in the wake of the Great Recession. What people in Las Vegas are doing offers a vision of what it will take for communities across the country to rebound from this tough economic and social time. It’s not a mere roll of the dice that’s bringing Vegas back, but intentional actions to create real change and community.

Source: socialtimes.com

The Harwood Institute worked in Las Vegas earlier this decade with the support of the Omidyar Network. In 2004 we produced a report entitled, On the American Frontier. It captured the incredible “can-do spirit, confidence, proven track record of growth, and innate sense of vibrancy” of Southern Nevada. For many people, Vegas was the best, last chance to pursue a customized version of the American Dream. But even then people were starting to wonder if they had too much of a good thing.

Today things are different in Vegas. For starters, the area ranks near the top in the nation in home foreclosures, school dropouts, unemployment and lost jobs, while philanthropic dollars have dried up. And yet, something genuinely hopeful is happening there, something worth paying attention to.

Political and civic leaders, including heads of major organizations, funders, the state senate majority leader, and public broadcasters gathered to hear my speech. In 2004, it might have been hard to gather such leaders for a similar event, and especially one where they so openly engaged one another. But now, despite the Great Recession – or maybe because of it – folks are creating new groups and relationships to get things done.

Many people came up to me during my time there to say that our work some five to 10 years ago had helped to seed the growth of new groups and strengthen existing ones. They told me we had helped them to see why it is so critical to turn outward and to think about change differently. One person even asked how I felt being back in town given that so much current activity can be traced back to our work. What I told her is that the real credit goes to people in Vegas – those individuals and groups that chose to step forward and use our work to innovate, experiment, and are now connecting their efforts to others. And it is an amazing collection of groups, which includes:

• Three Square
• Community We Will
• Southern Regional Nevada Planning Coalition
• KNPR and Vegas PBS
• Nevada Gives

Source: brainleadersandlearners.com

What’s so promising in Vegas is that public innovators are creating a new civic foundation. Each group has its own promising story, and together they represent a major shift in the community. Now, all this movement is still just emerging, but the trajectory is clear.

These groups are boundary spanners, network builders, engagers of the community, and most importantly action oriented. It is this very foundation that is essential for a community to move forward. We all know the Vegas line, “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas.” Well, I want to add a new line today: “What Happens in Vegas, Spreads beyond Vegas.”

More towns across the nation are heeding a similar community call as that of Las Vegas. Bettering the public through our actions now will carve out a path of change that helps guide representatives down the right path for your community. Isn’t it beyond time that a chance is taken on changing community through our own actions?

Does this sound like something already happening your in community? If so, we would love to hear some key concepts you think makes it work. Change only happens when action is taken, so write your thoughts in the box below and keep the momentum going.

Interested in learning more about what happens in Las Vegas? Click here to check out the SOTRU Las Vegas episode to find out about what’s going on.

A dynamic public speaker, Rich Harwood is a frequent keynote for foundations and national organizations. He is an expert contributor on national and syndicated media outlets including MSNBC, NPR, The Christian Science Monitor, CNN’s Inside Politics, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Special Report with Brit Hume, C-SPAN, and many others. He is also the author of Hope Unraveled: The people\’92s retreat and our way back (2005), Make Hope Real: How we can accelerate change for the public good (2008) and numerous studies, articles and essays chronicling vital issues of our time. His most recent written work, Why We\’92re Here: The Powerful Impact of Public Broadcasters When They Turn Outward, is being published and distributed in Spring 2011. You can follow him on twitter @RichHarwood and facebook.com/richharwood.

You can read Rich’s posts every Tuesday on State of the Re:Union’s website.

In this video interview, Capacity Building Beyond Community Services, the topic is the meaning of “community” and “neighborhood.”

You can watch the video here, or read the transcript below. Then use the comment section below to let us know what your definition of community and neighborhood is.

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John McKnight (Click to Watch Video)

“Community” is one of those words which is… has a different meaning for almost every person. If I say community and you think of yours, it’s not mine. In fact, if…if you think of community, whatever yours is, it probably isn’t the same as the person that lives next door to you, even somebody in your household. So it isn’t very helpful to say I’m interested in the community, because you could say I’m a member of a community of scholars, and that is historians across the United States.

Geographically it’s unlimited. But the thing we became clear on, I started at the university a program in community studies, so I had to decide pretty specifically what I meant if I was going to study it, and I learned that it’s pretty arbitrary. Therefore, you make up your own definition as to what you mean by community.

And so what we meant. I’m with a group there at the Asset-Based Community Development Institute, and what we meant was a neighborhood, a physical place, not a community of scholars, right? And a small, physical place, a small town or a neighborhood, and that’s what we were focused on when we said community studies, that’s what we meant.

And then, you might say even then how would you define a neighborhood, right? What…what…what is it? And I think the most useful thing that we could do was to listen to people who live there and say, “What neighborhood is this?” That is, a neighborhood is really about a related group of people. And somebody in city hall can draw a line [Laughs] around a part…within the city, but that doesn’t mean the people there would agree that’s their neighborhood.

A neighborhood is defined by the people who live in a place, and so we always follow the local understanding of the residents as to what this neighborhood is or the boundaries, the Van Ryan Expressway over there and, ah, the creek that goes down Mill Street over here and they’d say, generally, “that’s our neighborhood.”

So when we’re thinking about community, we’re thinking about resident-defined place. And the reason for that is because what people feel is their neighborhood is telling you what they’re motivated to do something about.

Source: E. Kvelland from Wikimedia Commons

So it’s the commitment and feeling of a local person’s definition about a place that if you want to see things get organized and things begin to improve, you have to depend on the motives of people to feel an identity with a place. So we’ve always focused on what people think is their neighborhood and understood that the motives people have to act are closely tied to a place that they feel is theirs.

In other words, if you ask me, I live in Chicago, do I want to improve Chicago, which some people would say, “My community is Chicago.” It would be pretty hard for me to say… I might say yes, but I don’t know where’s the handle, what… how am I going to do that, right? But if you said do I want to improve my neighborhood, I’d say yes, and I’d say yes, because it seemed to me doable and I care more strongly about my neighborhood than I do about Chicago. So that’s the way we have understood. It’s a place people feel related to and where they have relationships with each other.

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John McKnight

John McKnight is an expert on communities. An Ohio native who currently lives near Chicago, he has spent decades organizing communities and researching them, primarily in the Windy City itself. In the course of his career, he mobilized neighborhoods during the civil rights movement, wrote several books about community development, created a center for urban affairs at Northwestern University, and even taught the current President a thing or two about advocacy. (Yes, it’s true: way back when, a young and eager Barack Obama interned at McKnight’s training program for community organizers in southeast Chicago). If that’s not enough, he recently co-authored a book called “The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods.”

State of the Re:Union will be featuring pieces from John McKnight and Peter Block of Abundant Community every other Monday.

I’ve wondered about this. In science fiction, technology is often viewed as a threat to democracy, individual freedom or even (as in those cases in which robots try to take over) humankind itself. In real life, however, technology can help make our democracies work better.

The Olathe City Council doing an E-Town meeting on the budget.

I’m always looking for good examples of communities using technology or social media to engage people in the process of local problem solving and decision making. Here’s one: Olathe, Kansas, recently was named one of the top “digital cities” by the Center for Digital Government and Government Technology magazine.

Like most communities, the city has public meetings to discuss budget issues and holds them in different venues in an effort to get people to come. “In our experience, budget hearings at city hall were dwindling,” says Erin Vader, the city’s manager of communications and public engagement. “So you take it on the road and do road shows.”

But even going out to the neighborhoods and bringing meetings to the people didn’t seem to get the crowds, so the city’s communications and public engagement department went in search of new ideas.

So they decided to hold an E-Town meeting in the studio of the local government access cable station and to drive interest and participation with social media. Chris Hernandez, a Kansas City TV news personality hosted the meeting, which was cablecast and live-streamed, and members of the public asked questions to city council members via e-mail, the city’s budget web page, Twitter and facebook.

The city launched an online forum six days before the scheduled e-meeting, asking citizens to submit questions. Questions could also be submitted live during the meeting.

Local officials consider the experiment a success. The city’s facebook page saw an increase of about 60 percent in post views during the live-cast of the event and traffic on the city’s budget web page increased nine fold.

“We’re trying to meet the citizens where they are,” explained Chris Kelly, the city’s IT director Chris Kelly, “which is online.”

This is the 11th year the digital cities award has been given for cities that increase efficiencies and achieve better results by using technology. Olathe won first place in the category of cities with between 125,000 and 249,999 residents. The e-town hall wasn’t the only one reason for their award. Olathe has used technology to consolidate its 911 dispatch system with the county and used improve meter reading machines to save money, which is being used to promote other energy saving measures.

Getting people out to budget hearings can be a tough sell, especially in these days when the choices are almost always sub-optimal. Ordinarily, the public only gets involved when some favored program or department is facing the chopping block. But it is important these days when the choices are so tough that the public is both aware of and engaged in the process, and technology can help. Not just in discussing the issues, but also in giving citizens a role in helping local government do more with less.

The National Civic League

One of the other localities named in the digital cities survey was Long Beach, California. I’ve been doing some research on the city’s efforts to eliminate its “structural deficit.” Better use of technology is one of the ways they are trying to save on labor and money.

The city recently unveiled its “Go Long Beach” app, which allows citizens with smart phones to report problems like graffiti, pot holes, downed traffic signs and weed strewn yards so the city can respond to them more quickly and efficiently. The app allows a user to take a picture of the problem and the GPS on the smart phone tells city crews exactly where to go.

Long Beach has also made strides in using technology for more efficient document storage, upgraded its fiber optic networks and used streaming video and social media to keep citizens in touch with what’s going on at city hall.

Technology is no panacea. And there is always a risk that the robots may in fact decide to take over, but in the meantime, these cost savings and interactive engagement possibilities can increase citizen trust and understanding of government and the challenges facing localities in this time of financial crisis.

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

Today, we’re sharing an excerpt from a post by Peter Block of Abundant Community. He tells how one community keeps growing the list of things to be thankful for: each other. To read the original excerpt in its entirety, click here.

Seeing the Abundance in the Neighborhood

Source: pointloma.edu

The [following] story has the elements of what we can call a competent neighborhood. Creating competence starts with making visible the gifts of everyone in the neighborhood—the families, the young people, the old people, the vulnerable people, the troublesome people. Everyone. We do this not out of altruism, but to create the elements of a satisfying life. Here is a perfect example of how it works:

Last summer, when Theron looked through the open door of the metalworking shop Mr. Thompson had set up in his garage, the old man invited him in. Something clicked. Theron began to stop by every day, and he started bringing home metal pieces he’d learned to make.

Naomi could see Theron change. He was proud of what he made—Mr. Thompson even paid him to make a few things. Naomi said she’d finally stopped worrying about what Theron was doing after school. Jackie admitted that her son Alvin was in trouble, and she asked Naomi if there might be someone in the neighborhood whose skills would interest Alvin.

They knew that Gerald Lilly was into fishing, and that Sam Wheatley was a saxophonist, but that was about it. They decided to ask all the men in the neighborhood about their interests and skills. Mr. Thompson agreed to go with them. It took three weeks to visit all the men on the block. When they were done, they were amazed at what they had found: men who knew juggling, barbecuing, bookkeeping, hunting, haircutting, bowling, investigating crimes, writing poems, fixing cars, weightlifting, choral singing, teaching dogs tricks, mathematics, praying, and how to play trumpet, drums, and sax.

Source: tlc.howstuffworks.com

They found enough talent for all the kids in the neighborhood to tap into. Three of the men they met—Charles Wilt, Mark Sutter, and Sonny Reed—joined Naomi, Jackie, and Mr. Thompson in finding out what the kids on the block were interested in learning.

When they got together after interviewing the kids, Mark talked about a boy he met who knew about computers. Why not ask all the kids what they knew about? Then they could match adults to the kids, just as they planned to match up the kids with the grown-ups. When they were done, they found they had 22 things the young people knew that might interest some adults on the block.

The six neighbors named themselves the Matchmakers and, as they got more experience, they began to connect neighbors who shared the same interests.

The members of this community share this sentiment, “All the lines are broken; we’re all connected.  We’re a real community now.”

[These stories are what] thicken the social fabric. It makes the community’s gifts more widely available in support of the family. If we do it, even in small way, we find that much of what we once purchased is at hand: carpentry, Internet knowledge, listening, driving a truck, math, auto repair, organizing ability, gardening, haircutting, wallpapering, making videos, babysitting, house painting, accounting, soccer coaching, artistic abilities, cooking, fitness knowledge, sitting with the old or the ill, health remedies, sewing. And some of those things will come from the elderly, the young, the isolated, and the unemployed.

These local connections can give the modern family what the extended family once provided: A place with a strong culture of kin, friends, and neighbors. Together we raise our children, manage health, support local enterprise, and care for those on the margin.

SOTRU gives a tip of the hat to neighbors who create a self-reliant community, and more importantly, become a family through caring and sharing. This is an essential element of true community. This is what makes a great Thanksgiving story. Do you have a special tone running through your community that rings out songs of thankfulness? We would love for you to share them with us. It would give SOTRU one more thing to be thankful for.

Peter Block co-authored the book “The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods.” He is a partner in Designed Learning, a training company that offers workshops to build the skills outlined in his books. He is the author of Flawless Consulting, Stewardship, The Answer to How Is Yes, and Community. He is the recipient of numerous awards, most recently the Organization Development Network’s 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award.

State of the Re:Union contributor Mike McGrath of the National Civic League shares the logic behind how such a simplistic and classicly iconic game, Pac-Man, is helping youths in L.A.’s inner city to learn in-depth understanding and engage in critical thinking regarding digital media and its role in their futures.

Source: anticool.com

I read an article in the New York Times recently that noted that some of the top execs at Silicon Valley firms were sending their kids to private schools where the students aren’t allowed to use computers.

Learning is about using your own brain, not some artificial intelligence, so it makes some sense. I sometimes think Google, Wikipedia and IMDB are atrophying my memory. But if tech execs are really sending their kids to computer-free schools it’s more than a little ironic. Will the luxury of not becoming computer literate until middle school become a new badge of affluence, like summering in the Hamptons?

I ask this because out in the everyday world, nonprofits, foundations and educators are trying to figure out how to get kids from low income communities to use more computers, more broadband, more devices—and to be more savvy and critical about the media they encounter in everyday life.

As one activist from the tribal areas of San Diego County pointed out in an interview I did a while ago, you can’t even apply for a job at Home Depot if you can’t use a computer. In fact, new information and technologies (ICTs) have tremendous potential for empowering kids and narrowing the gaps between haves and have-nots in our communities.

That’s the premise, at any rate, of the most recent issue of the National Civic Review, which is in its one-hundredth year of publishing. The issue attacks this question from a number of different angles, but among the most original is Katynka Martinez’s essay, “Pac-Man Meets the Minutemen: Video Games by Los Angeles Latino Youth.” The article relates lessons learned from a project in the Pico Union and Korea Town sections of Los Angeles to teach kids media literacy and creativity by having them design their own versions of the classic, first generation computer game, Pac-Man.

Why Pac-Man? That’s part of the fun of this article. The students, who attended a high school just west of downtown L.A., thought they were going to work on something comparable to Guitar Hero, say, or Counter Strike. “Instead they were told that they’d be creating a version of Pac-Man,” writes Martinez, . They grumbled upon hearing the news. The 1980s game is pretty simple, does not involve serious acts of violence, and does not feature scantily clad women. For that matter, it features no humans. The storyline—chomping on pellets and the occasional fruit while running away from ghosts—is quite different from the actions of professional athletes or skilled marksman. Pac-Man was an anomaly among space shooter games that were popular when it was released, and it continues to stand out when compared to contemporary games.”

The project began with students putting pencil to paper and creating maps of their neighborhoods and homes. Then they were asked to match this urban landscape with the Pac-Man maze. In one of the student games, Pac-Man became a boy who was helping a hot dog vendor in MacArthur Park who is being menaced by demonic hot dog chomping ducks. In another version, the hero is a boy running away from aggressive, alcoholic homeless men in his neighborhood. In a third version, an immigrant is being chased by anti-immigration “Minutemen” vigilantes.

The games allowed these students to reconstruct their own urban landscapes and grapple with issue and challenges people face in those neighborhoods in ways that defy the prevailing stereotypes from the media in all its forms, video games not excluded.

The goal is to help these students develop a critical distance from and understanding of digital media in general, and more specifically, games, which are being used these days for everything from on the job training at McDonald’s to Army recruitment.

“It is essential that today’s youth learn to deconstruct and read video games as they would a novel or a poem in school,” write Martinez. Educators and media activists should engage in productive conversations with youth to discover what attracts them to the game they play.”

While I’m on the subject of media, congratulations to Youth Radio, which recently won a Peabody Award. Another article in the review focuses on Youth Radio’s uses of mobile media.

The National Civic Review issue on technology and media was published with the support of ZeroDivide. Electronic versions of the articles are available free of charge at the Wiley Online Library.

Spin around in any direction and there is a 99 percent chance that what your eyes land on is somehow connected with the digital realm. There is very little in modern society that is not affected by digital media. Think about it, what is the role of digital media in your existence? What additional advice, experience or knowledge can be offered to those looking toward the future of digital media? We know that many readers have nuggets of wisdom just waiting to be heard, so what are you waiting for? Of course we want to know.

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

State of the Re:Union would like to welcome our newest contributor to SOTRU, Garlin Gilchrist II. Hailing from Detroit, Michigan, Garlin created Detroit Diaspora, an active Detroit community network of people looking to stay connected. As a National Campaign Director for MoveOn.org, he currently resides in Washington D.C. with his beautiful wife, Ellen.

After graduating with degrees in Computer Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Michigan, he became a Software Engineer at Microsoft. By day, Garlin helped build SharePoint into the fastest growth product in the company’s history. On his personal time, Garlin sought out opportunities to connect his technical skills with community building efforts across the country.

This led to Garlin’s co-founding The SuperSpade: Black Thought at the Highest Level, a leading Black political blog. He served as Social Media Manager for the 2008 Obama campaign in Washington, and then became Director of New Media at the Center for Community Change.

Today Garlin works at the crossroads of traditional political organizing and online activism. He speaks before diverse audiences on empowerment in revolutionary new organizing spaces, increasing civic engagement & participation though emerging technologies and protecting civil rights in the age of the Internet.

Now, as the latest contributor to our website, Garlin lends his experience and sage advice, helping SOTRU continue engaging with and connecting community. Look for his first post next Wednesday.