St. Patrick's Day Community Self-Organizing Dinner

Here is a brief account of our March dinner gathering around Community Self-Organizing:

We met on Saint Patrick’s Day, so dinner was corned beef and cabbage.  Among us were 4 grown-ups and 5 kids.  Grown-ups included:

• Hugh, who lives in the Palmer Ranch development and works downtown at the Sarasota County government
• Tim, who lives in the Alta Vista neighborhood and works in Central-Cocoanut at SCOPE
• Dennis, who lives in the Central-Cocoanut neighborhood, where he leads a resident weather monitoring team
• Allison, who lives in Central-Cocoanut as a neighbor-psychologist and works in Tampa at the Children’s Board

Here is a picture of the grown-ups in attendance:

Kids included:

• Amorie and Holly, who live in Central-Cocoanut and work at Gocio Elementary as first-graders
• Dalisha and Dareeona, who live in Central-Cocoanut and work at Fruitville Elementary as a fourth-grader and first-grader, respectively
• Chunk Chunk, who lives in Central-Cocoanut and works at home-based childcare in the neighborhood.

Here is a picture of the kids in attendance (eating dinner picnic-style on the front stoop):

When he arrived, Hugh surprised the neighborkids with a gift of…SEED PACKETS from Burpee Farms!  (What he didn’t realize is that Burpee Farms is located in the very same town in Pennsylvania where Allison grew up.) 

This led to some fun conversation about the possibilities of homegrown food – a topic that is receiving increased attention here in Sarasota and also in communities across the country. Those of us who live in Central-Cocoanut talked about where in the neighborhood we’d like to plant the various vegetable seeds, and which neighbors we’ll approach for help (15^th Street neighbors who immediately came to mind were Deacon John, who is a professional gardener at Plymouth Harbor, and also Jack and her roommates, who planted a massive, very productive front-yard vegetable garden last summer.  These are neighbors we’ve met while exploring Central-Cocoanut through scavenger-hunting.)  

Since it was Saint Patrick’s Day, the kids got busy creating a festive atmosphere by rewarding everyone who showed up wearing GREEN – and pinching anybody who was green-less!  Amorie then offered homemade Shamrock tattoos for anyone who hadn’t received one earlier in the day at work or school.  Although the “fun factor” is often overlooked when discussion groups meet, it is such an important dimension to cultivate for the sake of cohesion and creative thinking, so the neighborkids’ contributions were very much appreciated.  

  

The kids also made another batch of Google Juice to share with everyone – the sweet, lemony elixir they invented as part of their strategy for entering the Google Fiber contest.  Tart and refreshing J

As for the discussion that developed over the course of the evening, here are some of the themes, and how they might relate to concepts of community self-organizing: 

CELEBRATING NEIGHBORKIDS: 

We talked some about the monthly neighborkid dinners that have begun in Central-Cocoanut.  As the invitations state, these are celebrations during which we gather in honor of a particular neighborkid, “To express appreciation for our scavenger hunters, to invest in their potential as individuals, and to come together as a neighborhood.”  The featured neighborkids describe their hopes for themselves and the neighborhood, and we consider these aspirations in light of current realities, as reflected in aggregate data (available through local systems such as the school district, the sheriff’s department, the health department, and social service networks), and as revealed in the “scrapbook of assets” discovered through neighborhood scavenger-hunting.   Our aim is to have some serious fun identifying ways of connecting, and re-constellating efforts as needed, in order to realize the local potential expressed through the wisdom of our neighborkids. 

The most recent February dinner was in honor of 6-year-old Dareeona, and she had invited “Mr. Hugh” to attend, after getting to know him at the January dinner on Community Self-Organizing.   So tonight we took a look at the folder of materials prepared for all members of “Team Darry,” which included this summary of her expressed hopes:

A year from now: 

That I can hold the baby.  [Darry’s 2-month-old sister]

As a teenager: 

I can do anything I want, like cook, and find a job, and work in class.

As a grown-up: 

I will be a teacher and teach reading books.

 

For the neighborhood: 

The trees would be different – green - and all the houses would be yellow, like Miss Joanna’s house.  [Fellow neighbor Joanna recently repainted her house, and many neighborkids were actively involved as house painters.]

We also took a quick look at the aggregate data about the student experience across elementary schools in Sarasota County -- with an intentional focus on Fruitville Elementary, as this is Darry’s school and is one of the two elementary schools to which Central-Cocoanut kids are bussed.  We briefly examined patterns in publicly accessible data associated with academic achievement (math skill and reading at grade-level), involvement (daily attendance and school-year stability), and characteristics of the student body (ethnic diversity, language talent, and family income).  This is deserving of more time and attention, but at least began to illustrate how aggregate data pattern-tracking, when combined with an awareness of the particularities of lived experience, can be useful in spotting community dynamics and detecting community-wide self-organizing, particularly as this relates to the experience of local children. 

GOOGLE FIBER:

With the renaming of City Island and Mayor Clapp’s recent dive into the shark tank at Mote Marine, we’ve got some great examples of active community engagement in Sarasota these days.  The enthusiastic and notably whimsical efforts of local folks to convince Google to choose this community for super high-speed Internet have been providing fascinating examples of community self-organizing!

Tonight we talked some about how the Internet can make such a difference when it comes to the democratizing of knowledge.  We noted, however, that there is a risk of dramatically reinforcing the digital divide if some folks wind up having Internet capacities 100x faster than current options while others are not yet able to afford Internet access whatsoever.   We talked some about the neighborkid-oriented Google Fiber submission being prepared in Central-Cocoanut, and how it might be synchronized with the applications being prepared by the local city/county government and other citizen groups in Sarasota, in order to optimize the likelihood of increased local dialogue about technology and community.  Tim and Hugh also shared some about their recent efforts -- through SCOPE and the County government, respectively – to explore the possibility of establishing wifi networks for whole neighborhoods. 

TEDx:

As we talked about features of community that optimize potential for learning, we then found ourselves discussing TED talks, with their emphasis on “ideas worth spreading,” and Hugh told us about TEDx, which is described online as “a new program that enables local communities such as schools, businesses, libraries, neighborhoods or just groups of friends to organize, design and host their own independent, TED-like events.”  He shared some ideas about ways to bring TEDx to life here in Sarasota, and we considered some ways that this might happen both through formal institutions and through more informal neighbor-led efforts. 

To be continued next month…hope you'll drop by then!