Informs our Understanding

To turn it around, we must build it so they’ll come

   That line, often misquoted as “they will come,” was written by W.P. Kinsella in his 1982 book, “Shoeless Joe,” which became the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams,” which made the line iconic in American culture (along with, “Go the distance!” from the same book and movie).

   “I knew about halfway through the novel that I was creating something special,” Kinsella told me recently in an e-mail from his home in British Columbia. “So after that, nothing surprised me.”

   Why do Kinsella’s words resonate? Because, like most clichés, they are rooted in simple truth.

   And for Michigan, a state that people, especially young people, are leaving by the thousands, that truth may be getting overlooked.

   “It’s the place, stupid!”

   That’s a headline from a recent book compiled by the Michigan Municipal League that attempts, in a series of essays, to recast the debate over Michigan’s future from one about taxes and regulation to one about how we build the kinds of places where people want to live, where people feel safe and happy, where people can exercise their ideas and find the “human capital” to turn them into something tangible. If we do that, the evidence is clear from places that already have, people will come.

   The wrong debate

   For the four decades that I have been covering public policy debates in Michigan, much of the expelled hot air has been about the best use of taxes and regulations, more or less, to create a climate that will attract investment capital —money that creates jobs. How different Michigan would look today if that debate had been about the best way to attract “human capital” — or to invest in it, so Michigan today had a well-educated 21st-Century work force instead of one that struggles with basic literacy.

   In his introduction to “The Economics of Place,” Municipal League CEO Dan Gilmartin writes: “With apologies to many of my friends who represent traditional business organizations, you guys need a new playbook. Finding a correlation between low tax states like Mississippi and high–income states like Massachusetts is near impossible, although I will submit they both start with the same letter. I loathe paying taxes as much as the next guy, and advocate for squeezing more out of every dollar raised, but simply cutting taxes and expecting the growth to follow in an environment that increasingly depends on quality of place is a scheme hatched in some antitax Disneyland. … Worse yet, the tax debate continues to sap energy and keeps us from acting on what really matters economically.”

   The book lays out eight assets that are critical to quality of place today, some reflecting a generational shift away from suburban living — suburbs are today the fastest-aging segment of the American demographic — and others reflect the relentless advance of technology.

   They are walkability, green initiatives, a healthy arts/ culture scene, a climate for entrepreneurs, multiculturalism, constant connectivity, effective public transit and educational institutions that serve as community anchors.

   So is it any wonder that Ann Arbor weathered the Great Recession better than the rest of Michigan? Doesn’t it make sense that Grand Rapids has embraced the annual ArtPrize competition? Isn’t there a lot of promise in Detroit’s burgeoning Midtown?

   State of denial

   Some places are getting it, Gilmartin agreed.

   But the state as a whole? Still chasing that next auto plant and arguing about taxes and regulation.

   “It turns out,” Carol Coleta, aChicago-based consultant and former president of CEOs for Cities, writes in one of the book’s chapters that “58% of any city’s success, when success is measured by per capita income, is predicted by the percentage of college graduates in its population. … As much as I believe that talent is the primary driver of city success, I believe quality of place is a deep driver of talent. You can’t separate the two.”

   In other words, if you build it …

   “The Economics of Place: The Value of Building Communities Around People” is available for $14.95 throughwww.economics   ofplace.com   or Amazon.com  .

Chattanooga: Social Innovation and an Education Conversation Shift

SHIFT Chattanooga

Build community will to improve public education.

Shift is an awareness campaign emphasizing the importance of strong school systems in Chattanooga and beyond. It begins with a series of public ads containing local education data, a promotional website, and tools to foster a deeper level of civic engagement in the sociopolitical issues surrounding public education. The mission of Shift is to drive continuous improvement of public schools with the support of local citizens.

CreateHere is…

CreateHere is a Chattanooga, TN nonprofit; a group of residents and new recruits working for arts, economic, and cultural development in the urban core. We put creative processes to work and connect locals around pressing issues, including safety, education, jobs, and talent retention. Our projects include a leadership development fellowship, a small business planning course, a grants program for creatives, and Stand, the world’s largest community visioning effort.

What inspires our work? A belief that place-making and connectivity are the source of innovation. Chattanooga is full of people with ideas, passions, and skills bigger and more diverse than our own. We work to connect, to support, and to build.

_______________________________SHIFT Chattanooga: Investing in Public EducationFriday, November 11, 2011

“My one wish for education is that we all work together for the children…that the whole community begins to invest in the school system,” said Hollie Steele a 4th grade teacher at Ooltewah Elementary School in a recent SHIFT Chattanooga Conversation.

“When you see communities where every kid is waiting till graduation to leave, I can tell you the future of that community,” said Pete Cooper, President of theCommunity Foundation of Greater Chattanooga. This is not our community, he goes on to say. We’ve begun to understand that our greatest strength is understanding our individual assets and asserting them in targeted and deliberate projects. We can see this tangibly in the structures that we celebrate Chattanooga with every day.

SHIFT CONVERSATIONS Rachel Gammon from ShiftCha on Vimeo.

When we discuss education, and the inequities between some schools over others, it is more imperative than ever for our community to explore our individual resources, and how we can engage ourselves in public education. “I think that my one wish for education would be that every child enters school being valued and every child has the ability to reach all of their dreams and that there’s not a disparity between the education someone is getting in one part of town and the education someone is getting in another part of town,” said Rachel Gammon, Executive Director of the Neighborhood House.

This can become difficult when we are transfixed with debates over education reform, like school vouchers or teacher evaluations. We can become distanced, feeling like we are unable to participate in substantial support for public education because we aren’t the ones responsible for decisions concerning public education. And this is not true. We can support our children through giving teachers the resources to provide quality education, such as donating time to read and mentor children or giving school supplies to classrooms or telling teachers how much we appreciate what they do for our community.

Regardless of whatever occurs with the Equal Opportunity Scholarship Act, currently being debated in Nashville, public education will still exist in Hamilton County, and it is up to us to ensure that every child in Hamilton County receives a strong education—because it will impact the future of our community.

As Pete Cooper, President of the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga said, “Every body feels like this is a community where they own it, they have a stake in it, and it’s their community. This isn’t some place where they’re living, waiting to go somewhere else.” And that’s what makes Chattanooga special.

http://createhere.org/blog/shift_chattanooga_investing_in_public_education/

Something to Inform our Practice

What will the Library look like?

Libraries Become Centers for Sharing

By Cat Johnson 

10.03.11, 7:50am Comments (0)

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Ty Yurgelevic, manager of the Temescal Tool Lending Library. Photo by Steve Saldivar.

If you are still under the impression that libraries only lend books, then you’re in for a surprise. Libraries are multi-dimensional community hubs offering a range of in-house classes, workshops, cultural events and resources. Lending out toys, tools, sheet music, chess sets, child-development materials, seeds and more, libraries have established themselves as leaders in the sharing movement.

“Everyone doesn’t need to own a complete set of tools,” says Ty Yurgelevic, branch manager of the Temescal Tool Lending Library in Oakland, Calif. “It doesn’t make sense ecologically. Then there’s the cost and the storage. Why not have someone else store the tools and just use them when you need them?”

Part of the Oakland Public Library system, the tool lending library functions like any other self-standing branch. Patrons can borrow tools including drills, saws, routers, hand trucks, ladders, voltage detectors, lawn mowers and hundreds more, eight at a time, for three days. Born of the community’s need to retrofit, repair and restore homes after the 1989 earthquake and 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm, it is an example of a library emerging and evolving in stride with its community.

Initially funded by a community development block grant through the federal government, the library was limited to serving just one of Oakland’s seven districts. Once administration realized that it was going to be a program that took off, they found a way to fund the library through the general fund and opened it up to the whole city.

In the library’s first month, it loaned out 51 tools. It now has over 4,000 check-outs a month. It’s a great success, and it’s not alone. Two miles away is the long-running (1979) Berkeley Tool Lending Library, and others are springing up around the country. They make sense and communities are investing in them.

Photo via the Waltham Public Library.

There are also libraries that lend fishing poles and tackle boxes, kilowatt detectors for gauging electricity use, zines, adaptive-education materials,cake pans, portable smoke detectors, art and much more. Collections vary depending on donations and community interest, but libraries are committed to providing access to useful materials and are open to working out the logistics.

Despite financial hardship, libraries are re-positioning themselves as lenders of all types of materials, both physical and virtual. Forging boldly into the digital realm, many libraries now provide online access to catalogs, digitally-archived collections, music files and e-books.

“We’re changing the way we present information about our library,” says Micah May, Director of Strategy for the New York Public Library (NYPL), detailing some of the changes that the NYPL has made to enhance patrons’ digital experience with its new interactive catalog. Using a user-centered interface curated by Bibliocommons, library patrons can rate, recommend, review, tag and discuss books online.

Zine collection from the Linebaugh Public Library.

As patrons interact with the catalog, they enhance the collection and the catalog becomes more valuable and useful. The data is shared with over 40 library systems including Boston, Seattle, Vancouver, New York and Santa Clara.

“We’re optimistic that this will really change how people interact with libraries and the depth of interaction,” says May. “Libraries can become the go-to places for talking about, reviewing and discussing media.”

A platform that aggregates the shared experience and opinions of contributors, Bibliocommons taps into the power of the crowd to deepen and enrich the library experience.

“Libraries can become very powerful aggregators of knowledge,” says May, “that are built by the participation of users.”

Linebaugh Public Library in Murfreesboro, TN.

Widening their stance in the digital domain, libraries are still working out some of the kinks of loaning e-books. Two of the big publishing houses won’t sell libraries e-books until they develop a workable business model that addresses their concerns about profitability, author royalties and the unlimited “shelf-life” of an e-book. Other publishers do sell to libraries, and many library systems already have e-book catalogs thousands of titles deep.

The recent partnership between Amazon and 11,000 public libraries to lend e-books for Kindles has given libraries another way to expand their digital domain. Under the current agreement, library patrons search for e-books through their public library website. When they are ready to download one, there’s a “Send to Kindle” option that directs to the Amazon website where they log-in and the e-book is downloaded to their device. Not all e-books are available to borrow and concerns have been raised about such issues as user-privacy, the ability to borrow e-books more than once and whether libraries will get an affiliate commission from borrowed books that lead to a sale, but demand for e-books is growing and the move could increase library use significantly.

Photo by Cat Johnson.

Utilizing people’s willingness to contribute to the information commons, libraries are also enlisting patrons’ help in digitally archiving special collections that have not previously been available electronically. The NYPL has 40,000 restaurant menus spanning from historic to the present day that need to be transcribed from images into data so people can search them by dish, restaurant, date etc. Patrons can access images of the menus online and enter the information found on them into a database. The project has been met with great enthusiasm and participation. In the first four months, patrons have transcribed half a million dishes. By the end of next year, they’ll have an account management system in place so contributors can see what they’ve done and what others have done. And there’s a lot more where that came from.

“We found over 870 examples of collections that need this kind of work,” says May. “There are literally millions of tasks that librarians will never have the time to get to, and there's a great appetite by the public to contribute to something meaningful.”

”People collaboratively create knowledge,” he says. “I hope that 20 years from now,” he says, “collaboration and cooperation with users is the norm, not the exception; that users interact with everything.”

Lending e-books, menus, streaming music, power tools, puzzles and much more, libraries are continuing to adapt to the changing needs of the communities that they serve. They are future-forward, locally-focused entities connecting patrons with informative and useful materials to enhance ourselves and the world around us.

“People are always reminding us of what a great service we provide,” says Yurgelevic. “Most librarians go into the work because they enjoy reading, but they enjoy helping others. It’s a win-win when you get thanked, countless times every day, for doing your work.”

——

Check out all the posts in Shareable's four-part series on the future of libraries:

Part One: Libraries Aren't Dying, They're Evolving

Part Two: More Than Books: Libraries Strengthen Communities in Uncertain Times

Part Three: Libraries Become Centers for Sharing

Part Four: How Libraries Are Doing More With Less

The conflicting nature of man and society

"The principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible. But modern society seen concretely is a complex phenomenon. A salesman of a useless commodity, for instance, cannot function economically without lying; a skilled worker, a chemist, or a physician can. Similarly, a farmer, a worker, a teacher, and many a type of businessman can try to practice love without ceasing to function economically. Even if one recognizes the principle of capitalism as being incompatible with the principle of love, one must admit that "capitalism" is in itself a complex and constantly changing structure which still permits of a good deal of non-confomity and of personal latitude.

In saying this, however, I do not wish to imply that we can expect the present social system to continue indefinitely, and at the same time to hope for the realization of the ideal of love for one's brother. People capable of love, under the present system, are necessarily the exceptions; love is by necessity a marginal phenomenon in present-day Western society. Not so much because many occupations would not permit of a loving attitude, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon. The direction of such changes can, within the scope of this book, only be hinted at. Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends; man is an automaton - well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serve it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. Indeed, to speak of love is not "preaching," for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need in every human being. That this need has been obscured does not mean that it does not exist. To analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man."

Erich Fromm
1956
The Art of Loving

Informs Our Understanding

Detroit group awards grant

Creative space effort gets initial $2,500

By John Gallagher FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER

   The Detroit Foundation, a new nonprofit organization aiming to restore the creative spirit and passion for the city with fellow Michiganders and native Detroiters living elsewhere, has made its first grant, awarding $2,500 to the Chocolate Cake Design Collective.

   The collaborative is a group of recent College for Creative Studies graduates who plan to use the grant to create a “maker space” in which artists, photographers, graphic designers and other innovators can find room and facilities to create.

   The foundation places a heavy emphasis on nonprofit social entrepreneurship and has a stated goal of making Detroit a more innovation-friendly place to live and work.

   Founded in 2010, the Detroit Foundation now reports about 40 voting members and a mailing list of around 350 interested people, drawing members from among Detroit natives living and working around the country.

   The foundation hopes to recruit members into a pro-Detroit community to support inspiring projects through grants and pro-bono professional services in order to help the city recover from abandonment and decline.

   For more information, visit the website at www   .detroitfoundation.org  .

   “The Chocolate Cake Design Collective perfectly captures the creative visions the Detroit Foundation is eager to fund and collaborate with,” said foundation co-founder Adarsh Pandit, a metro Detroit native now living in Bos-ton. “Their short-term vision to create a working studio and their longer-term goals of creating a platform for arts education in the Detroit community is the type of fresh air thinking that we like to stand behind.”

   Foundation co-founder Ranvir Gujral, a Detroit-area native now living in Chicago, echoed that. “Our review of the many proposals received in the Fuel Detroit mini-grant has exposed us to (a) slew of passionate and creative ideas that have flooded into the city,” he said.

   The first grant recipients are using a former manufacturing space at 17501 Van Dyke to create a cooperative space in which artists can get access to a darkroom, kiln, printing press, wood shop and an electronics shop.

Soup to Nuts! (Or ALL the MAKINGS for an informal Design Charrette)

Former Ferndale mayor calls for brief protest at 9 and Woodward

By BILL LAITNER FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

   An Occupy Wall Street-type demonstration is to hit Fern-dale.

   Occupy Ferndale is scheduled 4-7 p.m. Friday. The organizer is Craig Covey, a former mayor, now Oakland County commissioner for Ferndale, Hazel Park and south Royal Oak.

   “We’re not camping out or setting up tents, but a lot of people here wanted to make a statement,” Covey said Wednesday.

   He said he expects as many as 100 people to gather at all four corners of 9 Mile and Woodward — a site that some consider to be Oakland County’s liberal soapbox, known for years of antiwar demonstrations in the 1990s.

   “I’ve got seniors coming, union members, students, and we have peacekeepers” who will monitor the crowd and keep participants from violating any ordinances, such as those against obstructing pedestrians and traffic, Covey said.

   A Facebook page called “Occupy Ferndale” showed Wednesday that 77 people “liked” the page and that many said they will be at Occupy Ferndale. The page links to Covey’s blog, where he lists political demands he believes the protest movement shares, including a need for more government oversight of “Wall Street and Big Banks,” the end to military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a halt to “attacks on labor unions (and) Social Security.”

   Ferndale Mayor Dave Coulter said Wednesday he plans to join the crowd, as did Oakland County Commissioner Marcia Gershenson, D-Bloomfield Township.

   Besides the Detroit site at Grand Circus Park, other Michigan sites with Occupy demonstrations include Flint, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Muskegon and Traverse City. The nationwide protest generally opposes Wall Street greed, unemployment and the nation’s widening wealth gap.

   Headquarters for the three-hour presence on Ferndale’s sidewalks is to be an eatery, AJ’s Music Café at 240 W. Nine Mile, one-half block west of the Occupy site on Woodward. Owner A.J. O’Neil said he would be facilitating the event with at least four kinds of soup.

   “This is right up our alley. We’ve been talking for years about what’s wrong with the economy here,” the 49-year-old Hazel Park resident said Wednesday.

   On Nov. 4-6, the café will host a summit where business, labor and community leaders will discuss the region’s problems — and perhaps have soup, O’Neil said.