Category: community

behavior · community · emotion · happiness · play · youtube

Laughter infects Berlin Train – the power of others and place

Beth Kelley

People often wonder just how powerful the people and spaces around us can be. Well, it turns out they can be pretty dang powerful! Just check out the video. Thanks Guy Kawasaki for sharing this out:

Giggles spread through an U-Bahn train in Berlin after one woman starts laughing. Happiness: the best infectious thing you can catch on a train.

 

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architecture · community · creativity · environment

Yarn bomber decorates public statues for Christmas

Beth Kelley1 Comment

This time of year, when it gets dark and cold, we make our spaces brighter and cheerier with lights and greenery and sweet, rich food. Or, in this case, some nicely knitted decorations to share and brighten up a public space:

Everett Herald Yarn Bomber
Three-year-old Kirsten Mitchell can barely contain her excitement as Renee Walstad helps her "yarn bomb" a statue outside of the Imagine Children's Museum in Everett on Tuesday afternoon. Walstad handed out several knit ornaments and other decorations for children to place around the intersection. By Julie Muhlstein, Herald Columnist

A pompom here, a knitted ornament there, Everett has been hit by a yarn bomber.

“I just wanted to spread some Christmas cheer,” Renee Walstad said.

Walstad is part of a warm-and-fuzzy movement being embraced by creative types all over the world.

Her efforts are modest compared with the ways some yarn artists decorate public places. For some yarn bombers, what began as a covert operation has blossomed into commissioned public art projects.

Since early this month, Walstad, 28, has been putting knitted and crocheted decorations on Everett’s downtown sculptures. She calls it a “Yarnvent calendar.”

“You know, like Advent,” the Lake Stevens woman said. “Every day before Christmas, I put up an ornament.”

If you stopped for coffee on Everett’s Colby Avenue on Wednesday, you may have noticed Walstad’s cheery calling cards. Near the Starbucks shop, the statue of three little girls holding hands — Georgia Gerber’s “Along Colby” — finds the girls dressed for the season in knitted red and green anklets. One of the bronze figures held a knitted Christmas ornament.

read more about her creations: ‘Yarn bomber’ leaving her knitted mark on Everett’s public art

Merry Christmas!

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architecture · community · design · environment · Nature

Roof gardens

Beth Kelley

I can see this roof garden from my office window.
Even in a city like Seattle where trees and moss are threatening to take over every unclaimed even-slightly-damp area, it is nice to see some greenery mixed in to the rooftops. I’m sorry to see they’ve let the grass go brown, but it is winter so that could be part of it. I notice so many other rooftops surrounding it have not taken advantage of their nice flat roofs, either for gardens or just "green roofs" or even solar panels. There is just so much wasted real estate up there it makes me sad.
Hooray rooftop gardeners, where ever you plant yourself!

behavior · community · environment

“Ag”tivism!

Beth Kelley

Promoting backyard farms, (or even large scale farms and modern-day homesteading), has a new term: "Ag"tivism. From the young and idealistic to the old and curmudgeonly, many people are finding time, space, and energy to grow their own tomatoes.

From The New Agtivist: Edith Floyd is making a Detroit urban farm, empty lot by empty lot:

Edith Floyd is the real deal. With little in the way of funding or organizational infrastructure, she runs Growing Joy Community Garden on the northeast side of Detroit. Not many folks bother to venture out to her neighborhood, but Edith has been inspiring me for years. I caught up with her on a cold, rainy November afternoon. While we talked in the dining room, her husband Henry watched their grandkids. Q. What neighborhood are we in? What is it like?

A. This is the northeast side — near the city airport. It’s surrounded by graveyards on three sides and then the other barrier is the railroad track; we are surrounded by railroad tracks, and sometimes those trains stay for like 30 minutes, so you are trapped; ain’t no way out.

Q. So you’ve seen a lot of changes.

A. Yeah, when I came it was beautiful — there were grocery stores in the center, like in the middle of the neighborhood, but … There was like 66 houses on this block, and now [there are] about six that people live in, and three need to be torn down, and the rest of it is empty. That’s where I’m putting my farm on, all the lots. [Editor's note: some are calling this practice "blotting." Here's a recent NPR story on blotting in Detroit.] …

Q. What are you growing on those lots?

A: Across the street I have my strawberry lot. I try to plant by lot. I have a collard green lot, a kale lot, an okra lot, an eggplant lot, green bean lot. I had a corn lot, but it didn’t work so well. Right now I have a garlic lot, I had a tomato lot, cucumber lot, squash, cabbage, broccoli, watermelon, cantaloupe. I like flowers, so I planted some of them. I had potatoes, mustard greens, turnip greens.

Q. That’s a lot of food!

A. Well, if it comes up it’s a lot, but I give some to the Capuchin Soup Kitchen. I sell some at Eastern Market, and Wayne State Market, but the cabbage does not sell so I don’t take cabbage there. (I still have about two of 300 pounds of cabbage I need to harvest.)

More at The New Agtivist: Edith Floyd is making a Detroit urban farm, empty lot by empty lot

NPR recently had an article about how people of my generation are also taking up organic farming with a passion:

…there’s a new surge of youthful vigor into American agriculture — at least in the corner of it devoted to organic, local food. Thousands of young people who’ve never farmed before are trying it out.

Some 250 of them gathered recently at a gorgeous estate in the Hudson River valley of New York: the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Tarrytown.

Some of these young farmers already have their own farms. Some are apprentices, working on more established farms for a year or two. And others are still just thinking about it. But the overwhelming majority of farmers here at this conference want to farm without chemical fertilizers or pesticides.

They were there to learn skills — from seminars on soil fertility, handling sheep, and how to find affordable land — and just as importantly, to meet each other. In the evening, they played music and danced.

They represent a new breed of farmer. Very few of them grew up on farms. Most of them went to college. And now, they want to grow vegetables, or feed pigs.

More at Who Are The Young Farmers Of ‘Generation Organic’?

The biggest question interviewers often ask is "why?" Why farm? Why go "backwards" to a life of farming.
For many people, it’s economical (see an earlier blog post about young entrepreneurs making a living farming, growing eggs and herding sheep). But an even bigger driver for most is the desire to feel connected to their environment, to enrich their surroundings with greenery and healthy food.

From Grist:

Q. You haven’t always been an urban farmer. What did you do before this?

A. I worked at Detroit Public Schools. I started out with the Head Start Center and then I went to the middle school, to the Ed Tech, [which is] now the Computer Lab. I started farming because they laid me off and didn’t call me back. Farming is not making a living, it’s just keeping food in my freezer. I try to sell some so I can get some more equipment, so it will be easier for me to farm.

Q. So how much money are you making in a season?

A. I was trying to reach for 3,000, but I only made it to two something. I have to add up the last bit; I haven’t got my last check. Every year I try to up it; the first year I made 1,000. The second year I went 2,000; this year I was trying to go for $3,000.

From NPR:

"It was born out of a concern for the environment," says Brian Bates, who plans to work at a farm in northern Michigan after he graduates from Penn State. "I spent the first two years of college with one question in mind – basically, how can I have the greatest impact in my life in the world. And the thing that I kept coming back to, that everyone connected to, was food."

Others say that they simply enjoy the work, the style of agrarian life, and the connection to food.

"I feel lost when I’m not farming, when I’m not out in the field. It’s where I find the most peace and harmony in my life," says Liz Moran, who helps manage Quail Hill Farm in the eastern end of Long Island, New York.

"When I look around, and you’re amongst the plants and the sunshine – that’s my office, that’s where I want to be," said Rodger Phillips, who grows food on an urban farm in Hartford, Conn.

Others talk about the satisfaction of doing something practical, creating something valuable. "Having a skill was really important to me. Having studied political science, I wanted to do something that was productive, that was real. To have a real skill, and be able to provide my family, my community, a vital element," says Kristin Carbone, who runs Radix Farm in Upper Marlboro, Maryland.

And then there was Lindsey Shute. "How did I get into farming? Because I started dating a farmer!" she says with a laugh. [blogger's note: check out a similar story in the book "xx"]

It seems that people are looking for more control over their wallets, their lives, and what they put in their stomachs, and are doing it through farming.

I know a lot of medical and researched reasons why playing in the dirt is good for you, but I’m curious about anecdotal reasons. Leave your experiences with gardening and farming in the comments.

behavior · community · creativity · Mental · psychology

How Knitting Behind Bars Transformed Maryland Convicts – News – GOOD

Beth Kelley1 Comment
Prisoners show off their knitting progress. Photo courtesy of the program.

Creating something with your hands, learning a craft, and being successful with something even as simple as crochet can have huge positive effects on people. That effect that be even more significant if you’ve been a screw-up your whole life, as many people behind bars feel they have been. This story about bringing knitting workshops to prisons is a great example, similar to the Puppies Behind Bars program or helping to raise endangered frogs, of how doing something as simple as a pearl and stitch can have huge psychologically positive impacts.

In late 2009, Lynn Zwerling stood in front of 600 male prisoners at the Pre-Release Unit in Jessup, Maryland. “Who wants to knit?” she asked the burly crowd. They looked at her like she was crazy.

Yet almost two years later, Zwerling and her associates have taught more than 100 prisoners to knit, while dozens more are on a waiting list to take her weekly class. “I have guys that have never missed one time in two years,” Zwerling says. “Some reported to us that they miss dinner to come to class.”

Zwerling, 67, retired in 2005 after 18 years of selling cars in Columbia, Maryland. She didn’t know what to do with her time, so she followed her passion and started a knitting group in her town. No one came to the first meeting, but the group quickly grew to 500 members. “I looked around the room one day and I saw a zen quality about it,” Zwerling says. “Here were people who didn’t know each other, had nothing in common, sitting together peacefully like little lambs knitting. I thought, ‘It makes me and these people feel so good. What would happen if I took knitting to a population that never experienced this before?’”

Her first thought was to bring knitting to a men’s prison, but she was turned down repeatedly. Wardens assumed the men wouldn’t be interested in a traditionally feminine hobby and worried about freely handing out knitting needles to prisoners who had been convicted of violent crimes. Five years passed before the Pre-Release Unit in Jessup accepted her, and Knitting Behind Bars was born. “I [wanted to teach] them something that I love that I really believe will make them focus and happy,” Zwerling says. “I really believe that it’s more than a craft. This has the ability to transform you.”

via How Knitting Behind Bars Transformed Maryland Convicts – News – GOOD.

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behavior · community · environment · Social

The new economy is local, handmade

Beth Kelley1 Comment
English: Looking northeast at Zukkie's Bike Sh...
The new economy is local. Image via Wikipedia

I read a great article in Fast Company yesterday by Bruce Nussbaum, the former assistant managing editor for Business Week and a Professor of Innovation and Design at Parsons The New School of Design, about a trend that he refers to as “indie capitalism,” this idea of a homemade economy. Homemade in many ways: products made at home and sold from there, locally focused market, and driven by small, independent entrepreneurs:

You won’t learn about it in business school, hear about it from Wall Street, or see it in Palo Alto. But if you spend time in Bushwick, Brooklyn, or on Rivington Street in Manhattan, you just might detect the outlines of an emerging “indie” capitalism. This new form of capitalism is not just about conventional startups and technology and venture capitalists. If you add up all the trends under way today, I believe we are beginning to see the start of something original, and perhaps wonderful. It may prove to be the economic and social antidote to the failed financial capitalism and crony capitalism that no longer delivers economic value in terms of jobs, income, and taxes to the people of this country.

Indie capitalism is local, not global, and cares about the community and jobs and says so right up front. Good things come from and are made locally by people you can see and know. The local focus makes indie capitalism intrinsically sustainable–energy is saved as a result of a way of life, not in an effort to reach a distinct and difficult goal.

Indie capitalism is socially, not transactionally, based. It’s not just Internet social, involving 5,000 friends, but personally social. Take Kickstarter, for example, where people fund the music, books, and products that they can watch develop over time. In this model, consumer, investor, audience, fan, helper, and producer conflate. People find and prepare their food the same way they find and prepare their music. And then they share it all.

More at 4 Reasons Why The Future Of Capitalism Is Homegrown, Small Scale, And Independent

I am really excited by this idea of a locally-sourced and locally-focused economy. I think it is better for the environment, but I also think it’s better for community building and having a better sense of place, to feel connected to where you live and what you do, and enriched by it.

Please read the entire, well-written article, and let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

architecture · community · environment

How The “Internet Of Things” Is Turning Cities Into Living Organisms

Beth Kelley

I used to be a technology journalist, and got to read a lot about the different ideas for the supposed “smart grid” that was supposedly going to reduce waste, alert emergency workers faster, and make our lives better. A few years later, it looks like it really might be happening!

With a little help from what’s called the Internet of Things, engineers are transforming cities from passive conduits for water into dynamic systems that store and manage it like the tissues of desert animals. By using the Internet to connect real-world sensors and control mechanisms to cloud-based control systems that can pull in streams from any other data source, including weather reports, these efforts enable conservation and money-saving measures that would have been impossible without this virtual nervous system.

Marcus Quigley, principal water engineer at the infrastructure engineering firm Geosyntec, has been tackling this problem using hardware from Internet of Things company ioBridge, whose Internet-connected sensors have been used in everything from location-aware home automation to tide gauges that tweet.

It may sound like a trivial problem, but the EPA estimates that the U.S. has $13 billion invested in wastewater infrastructure alone. More importantly, the majority of America’s largest cities–more than 700 in all–dump millions of gallons of raw sewage into our waterways every time it rains, because their sewer and stormwater systems were designed a century ago.

More at…

How The “Internet Of Things” Is Turning Cities Into Living Organisms

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anthropology · architecture · community · creativity · design · environment

Coloring inside the lanes: Art that creates community | Grist

Beth Kelley
The Fremont Turtle - Grist

I found another great article from Grist magazine about how something as simple as a bucket of paint, or several different colored, buckets of paint, can have a huge positive impact on a neighborhood:

Sunnyside Piazza, it is called, which may seem a bit much for a splash of color on asphalt, but in person, it seemed fitting. This whimsical design, interrupting the functional but monotonous gray of Portland’s street grid, felt like a somewhere. It seemed like a place deserving a name. It even felt like a “piazza.”

That was in 2002. I later learned that the Sunnyside Piazza was the second painted public square in Portland, facilitated by the nonprofit City Repair Project. Now, dozens of painted plazas, dubbed Intersection Repairs, pepper the map not just of Portland but also of Los Angeles, New York, St. Paul, and Seattle.

It all started in the mid-1990s with Share-It-Square, in Portland’s Sellwood neighborhood, where architect and City Repair co-founder Mark Lakeman lives. After visiting villages in Central America where residents gather around common spaces, Lakeman decided to bring similar spaces to Portland. “Putting the public space back where it’s supposed to be may not sound like a huge change,” Lakeman says, “but it has a profound effect on the social culture … We know that Americans are more lonely and isolated than ever before, but we don’t realize that the absence of cohesion in American communities is totally related to the absence of places where people can actually build that.”

more via Coloring inside the lanes: Art that creates community | Grist.

The article goes on to discuss how creating a group mural creates a sense of community:

“It’s not about the paint,” says professor Jan Semenza, a professor of public health at Portland State University who lives near the Sunnyside Piazza and has researched intersection repairs. “It’s about neighbors creating something bigger than themselves.” As an everyday intersection becomes someplace special, residents begin to experience the value of community. Neighbors paint themselves out of a corner — of the intersection, of their individual homes — and into the middle of the street. By turning an intersection from a dividing line between neighbors into a gathering place, residents begin to solve the problems that plague neighborhoods and cities. Where isolation existed, they find community. Where cars dominated, they create a people place. With a little paint, neighbors are solving big problems.

I have seeen some great community spaces also created out of roundabouts, water fountains at outdoor shopping centers, and often at landmarks like stairs or trees. Sometimes, if a natural landmark or meeting space isn’t in place, all it takes is some paint, chalk, or even ribbon to make a place significant and identify it as a community gathering space.

 

anthropology · behavior · community · happiness · hugs · psychology · Social

For those days you really need a hug

Beth Kelley

Ever have a day when you just really need a hug, like, right now? Well now you’re in luck:

"Jeff Lam and Lauren Perlow created The Nicest Place on the Internet, a place where you can feel warm and fuzzy with virtual hugs, because they were having an off day. It’s perfect for those chilly winter days."

Check out Creativity Online.

You can also go directly to the site: The Nicest Place on the Internet

You can also contribute your own hug.

I love this idea of virtual kindness; it’s a weird concept in a way, of people donating hugs (so to speak) to complete strangers. But, it’s great because it’s using the World Wide Web to create community and connections with people all over the world. Somehow, by being open to receiving a hug, even a virtual one, we are able to create connections and feel like part of a larger tribe or cohesion.

So often online communities can turn harsh or downright mean; it’s great to see online crowdsourcing being used for positive psychological benefits!

anthropology · behavior · community · Uncategorized

Getting the locals on board is key to conservation

Beth Kelley2 Comments
An ethnic Adivasi woman from the Kutia Kondh t...
You're looking at the face of sustainable conservation. Image via Wikipedia

Great post from the Human Directions of Natural Resource Management:

Indigenous peoples are key to preserving the world’s forests, and conservation reserves that exclude them suffer as a result, according to a new study from the World Bank.

Its analysis shows how deforestation plummets to its lowest levels when indigenous peoples continue living in protected areas, and are not forced out.

Across the world millions of tribal people are conservation refugees, but the World Bank says its evidence shows ‘forest conservation need not be at the expense of local livelihoods.’

Using satellite data from forest fires to help indicate deforestation levels, the study showed rates were lower by about 16% in indigenous areas between 2000-2008.

Read more at It’s Official – The Key To Conservation Lies With Indigenous Peoples

This is something Woodland Park Zoo, Izilwane, and many other non-profit organizations have been working on for years, so it’s nice to see the World Bank back them up.

So, the next question is what can be done to support local, indigenous groups to protect and care for their natural surroundings? Most groups want to preserve their environments and keep them handy for the next generation, but it is simply economically not viable, at least not how they see it.

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