I’m a coffee snob. It’s my only addiction. My co-workers have a Caffè Americano to thank each and every day for ushering me through my metamorphosis from curmudgeonly troll man to moderately friendly human being. The coffeehouse culture is also near and dear to my heart. I ran a coffeehouse a little more than ten years ago and made some extremely significant connections that I still enjoy. It was a tremendous place for building meaningful community. The employees knew the customers, the customers knew each other . . . it became a cultural hub where local musicians played and artists displayed their work. And while the technology over the last decade has changed the game and made wireless internet just about omnipresent, people did bring their laptops and work in. But I can’t recall it creating an environment of silent silos. Everyone regularly interacted. I miss that place.

That experience more than ten years ago, is pretty much the antithesis to my experience now. While I’m sure those community building coffeehouses still exist throughout the country, it seems the steady flow of traffic that I encounter on a daily basis is in one of two camps, the grab and go folks or the cordoned off lost in the laptop crowd. It’s really quiet with the only sounds coming from the cash register and espresso machine. Don’t get me wrong, quiet and peaceful is never a bad thing, but I think about how I see a lot of the same faces on both sides of the counter, but don’t know anybody’s name or see any of the regulars interacting.

As I stopped to pick up my morning life blood today, I started thinking about this concept and wondered if there were coffeehouses that decided they simply weren’t going to cater to either of the aforementioned camps. A simple Google search turned up Tazza Bakery Enoteca in Brooklyn, New York. Their website is a simple, one-page explanation of who they are that includes a downloadable menu, but more importantly, laying out what they offer, what you can expect. There is one section in particular that caught my attention:

“No cell phones. No wireless DSL. You come to Tazza to relax and relax you will. These are The Heights, after all… The heights of having your own little place: Tazza.”

18th Street Coffee House in Santa Monica, California, and Virgil’s House in Saratoga Springs, New York, are others that I’ve found that seem to have similar no laptop, no cell phone policies. Coffeehouses, can make an ideal work environment and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I wonder how much more sequestered we can possibly become. Some may say it’s a time and place for everything type of thing, but it seems that the nose in a laptop is far more prevalent than a face-to-face conversation.

We Want to Know:

• Is there a coffeehouse in your life that you stop by regularly? Do you know the staff and the other regulars?
• What do you think about the places with no laptop or cell phone policies? Do you know of other places like that?

Start the conversation below!

*Top photo from Wikimedia Commons by Arria Belli
*Home page featured photo from Flickr Commons by Toshihiro Oimatsu

Every year, Jacksonville Beach holds the Summer Jazz Concert Series at the Seawalk Pavilion, an open-air amphitheater. The series consists of a monthly concert over June, July and August. Although I’ve lived in Jacksonville now for more than twenty years, yesterday was the first time that I experienced the event. It took my parents visiting from Massachusetts and staying in a hotel next door to the venue for me to attend. I like to think that I fully support and participate in local culture, but when I asked myself why it took so long to arrive at this particular one, it came down to appeal, maybe even transcending my comfort zone. In other words, smooth jazz doesn’t do it for me. But the proximity made a walk over a must; I mean the horns were greeting us all the way to our patio and the mass of festive event-goes made it a no brainer.

My story’s conclusion is probably pretty predictable, we had a great time. I was shocked to see the wide range of people, seemingly from all walks of life, congregated and enjoying the concert together. And it didn’t matter that the particular music being played didn’t resonate with me, I was experiencing something with many members of my community that I typically wouldn’t. Like many, I tend to stay in my cultural comfort zone. The music itself IS important, or whatever the central draw is, but it’s not everything. All of us have little margin in life and the idea of filling that sacred bit of time with something you don’t particularly enjoy is, well, rather unappealing. But it’s more of an urging to occasionally break through those cultural comfort zones to explore all the different facets that makes your community what it is, and jumping head first into those unknown pockets.

A number of these types of stories have revealed themselves in State of the Re:Union episodes and features. In our first season, we did a video podcast feature that centered around community music stories called Sounds of the Re:Union. My own cultural victory (is that a bit of an overstatement?), reminded me of some of the stories that we covered in the Sounds series, stories where people forced themselves to try something new, to get involved with something they had zero experience

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The Milwaukee Ukulele Club consists of a group of people who come together to play the small instrument and find a meaningful, positive social outlet that creates a unique sense of community in their lives.  We spoke with the club’s founder and leader Lil Rev, as well as members Nina and Cheryl Ann.

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Old Time American music probably conjures images of Appalachia, but we found that Old Time culture is bringing community together in Los Angeles. Discover how old and young are coming together to create an exciting movement and in turn, removing some of the social walls people have put up between each other.

Can art change the world?

That’s what street artist JR asked himself last year when the TED conference said it would award him a $100,000 prize to change the world. A photographer from Paris, JR has made a reputation for pasting giant photographic portraits on urban surfaces like buildings, trains, bridges and rooftops. Working mostly in poor neighborhoods such as the slums of Kenya and the favelas of Brazil, he befriends local residents and uses them as models for his public art projects, which tell stories of the downtrodden or voiceless.

JR in Action - From Ted.com

Of course, JR is not your typical community do-gooder. The photographer – who only goes by his initials because his work often involves criminal trespassing – got his start as a 15-year-old graffiti artist, writing his name on Parisian rooftops with a few good friends. After finding a cheap camera on the subway, he decided to document their graffiti adventures – taking photos, making photocopies and plastering them on building walls. “The city was the best canvas I could imagine,” he told audience members during his TED talk in March.

Eventually, JR turned his artistic focus outward and began to document other people.  In the past few years he has plastered colossal portraits of Parisian thugs in bourgeois French neighborhoods; juxtaposed images of Palestinian and Israeli faces on security fences in the Middle East; and showcased photographs of dignified women in areas of conflict, places where females are often targets of violence.

Today his work is spreading, and with funds from his TED prize, JR is getting more people involved. Through his Inside Out Project, he invites people to send him their own photographic portraits so he can enlarge them and mail them back. In Tunisia, participants pasted portraits on billboards that used to boast images of their former dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.  In Brooklyn, photographs of 11 immigrant shopkeepers are displayed on uneven steps in Parks Slope, protesting a nearby development project that is forcing them out of business.

Before I Die - from candychang.com

Brooklyn’s Inside Out installation is just one of many interesting public art projects in the United States right now. In Boston, artist Tim Devin hangs posters on phone poles and other public fixtures to feature poetry, demographic data (like income level by neighborhood), or community-driven questions (“Do you identify with where you live?”). In New Orleans, artist Candy Chang transformed an old abandoned house into a giant chalkboard on which locals can write what they hope to achieve in their lifetimes. Called “Before I Die,” her art project has drawn a wide variety of response – like “I want to live in another country,” “go 200 mph,” “finish school,” or “tell my mother I love her” – helping people see what matters most to their neighbors.  (Visit Chang’s website to see her other art projects, including the Hypothetical Development project I blogged about a few months ago).

So from oversized portraits to posters and chalkboard houses, can art change the world? Can it change our communities? “Art is not supposed to change the world [or] change practical things,” said JR in his TED talk. But, he added, “It changes perceptions.” Posted on rooftops, stairs and walls, his enlarged photographs force local residents to confront uncomfortable questions about gentrification, discriminations and poverty, and they create a powerful statement about the community’s identity for passing visitors. They also give people with little money or power an opportunity to attain their own creative agency – not just viewing the art, but making it themselves.

Whatever form it takes, I think public art can give us a better understanding of the communities we inhabit, the people we share them with, and our potential to connect with one another. “What we see changes who we are,” said JR. “And when we act together, the whole thing is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Samantha Michaels is a senior at Northwestern University with a double major in journalism and international studies. A Chicago native, she hopes to become a foreign correspondent or travel writer someday, and during college has tried to see as many new places as possible.

You can read her posts on State of the Re:Union’s website every other Wednesday.

One of the biggest problems we face as a country is our inability to face problems, or rather, our inability to have face-to-face conversations about our problems, educate ourselves, weigh the options and come to a consensus about how to move forward.

Instead, we divide ourselves into warring camps, hand out talking points and get into the fight before we even understand the true nature of the problem or how we might do things differently. Name the issue—health care reform, climate change, the economic crisis—too much energy is being spent on gearing up for the big fight before we even have a real conversation.

I’m always heartened to find out about local groups like Hands Across North Quabbin that are trying to get people look at problems and challenges in a different way.

Hands is an ambitious effort to shift the “civic culture” in an economically depressed, politically polarized region of north central Massachusetts. Founder Mark Shoul compares the organization to the agricultural extension programs that were developed years ago to help rural dwellers learn new and better ways of growing crops and caring for farm animals, only in this case, the goal is to grow a healthier “civic culture.”

“We create projects where people come together to work

on issues of common concern so that trust gets built,” says Shoul, a longtime resident of the region who had headed up a local community development corporation before founding Hands.

North Quabbin is a region of fading mill towns—Athol and Orange—and “postcard” New England villages. Years ago, one of the region’s largest employers shut down leading to high levels of unemployment, political infighting about who was to “blame,” and growing class division between the older, blue collar residents and an influx of more affluent newcomers attracted to

Action Forum to prioritize community issues that need to be worked on

the unspoiled scenery and quaint New England architecture.

Concerned about the way things were going, Shoul gathered together some of the smartest and most respected people he knew to think and talk about ways of building trust and moving the community forward.

An opportunity arose when the town of Athol got into a brawl about what to do about the local high school, which had lost its accreditation by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. The superintendent came up with the plan to turn things around, but the plan was unacceptable to many in the community.

In the meantime, the local school committee (school board) had earned a statewide reputation for being divided and dysfunctional. “The problem wasn’t really the school committee,” says Shoul. “The school committee was a reflection of a divided community.”

Youth from five No. Quabbin churches stain picnic tables for community pavilion in Athol

Shoul’s organization stepped in to try to break the impasse, challenging opponents of the superintendent’s plan to come up with their own ideas. The first step was to organize a massive volunteer effort to fix up the high school building. The next was to organize a long-range strategic planning process for the Athol-Royalston Regional School District.

The upshot was this: the high school got its accreditation back, and the community developed a new sense of direction for the district. This was the first of several new initiatives inspired by Hands, including the development of a North Quabbin Green Economy Network and the construction of a new pavilion for community meetings.

I met Shoul last year at a national “civic innovators forum” in Washington, D.C. His organization was one of several civic start-ups I found out about during the forum. I asked Shoul to write an article about Hands for our quarterly, the National Civic Review. His article, co-authored with Hands board chair, Philip Rabinowitz, will appear in the summer issue of the review.

Shoul thinks it takes three conditions to change the “civic culture” of a community: First, a high level of dissatisfaction; second, a new vision of a better future; and third, action-oriented first steps on how to achieve that vision.
Admittedly, collaborative problem solving is a tough thing to do at the national level. There are too many entrenched interests groups, professional campaign organizers, PACs and lobbyists and too few forums for real discussions, and, frankly, most Americans simply aren’t engaged at that level of government.

But learning about local efforts such as Hands Across North Quabbin process helps us think about political issues and policy debates in a different way and, hopefully, to imagine a healthier civic culture in state capitols and Washington, D.C.

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 be appearing every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.