Local Community

If you're interested in revitalizing a community, understand that it can't be done from the outside. America is almost 250 years old, and she has never seen a revitalization program that worked from the outside-in. If you want to revitalize a community, it cannot be done without getting your hands dirty. You’ve got to engage the affected... See more

Humans have always known we cannot survive alone, and that to protect ourselves, we need to persuade others to care about us. We cultivate trusting reciprocal pacts with other people – blood relatives, but also friends and neighbours - through which reassure ourselves we can both care and be cared for, if the necessity strikes. These ties can have... See more

Over the last 50 years, people have shifted away from meeting and volunteering regularly in associations and informal gatherings such as support groups and Bible study groups, choosing instead to engage through “checkbook participation,” where we outsource and pay local and national organizations who hire professional staff to do the good works and... See more

The thought experiment also shows how important it is for local organizers and businesses to find different idioms than “loneliness” for framing their social projects. “Solving loneliness” is like “solving mental health:” a fool’s errand. It’s counterproductive to think this way. In my experience, it is the positive content of a social group that... See more

Donnelly and Schrantz are arguing for a major shift: “a long-overdue scaled investment in community organizing around the country.” I agree 100%, especially because I concur with them that how we do politics now, as a purely transactional process of extracting votes from people, has contributed to the crisis of democracy and the allure of... See more

Digital intermediation could help offer this kind of access to what Zacka calls “the lively and diverse intermingling of strangers in the public arena” and what the urban planner Jane Jacobs described as the “great and exuberant richness of differences and possibilities, many of these unique and unpredictable—and all the more valuable because they... See more

also think we need to learn to enjoy locality. Culture emerges from the connections between people, and I believe these are always strongest in person. Face-to-face cultural engagement is necessarily participatory, online cultural engagement rarely is. Nearly all of my most fulfilling and exciting experiences, those that have made me feel part of a

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