The CoolTown Blog
Friday, May 23
Investing in Community
For regular blog viewers, you may notice that I end the weekly theme on Fridays with a blog on how investors plan on implementing these visions in a real town, a CoolTown. Here's how the group plans on helping enable a sense of community:
1. Focus on a target audience - in this case it's the cultural creatives. Learn as much as possible about the things they like to do, experience and prioritize. Learn about their sub-groups as well, like the free agents. This is the common interest that initially draws people together.
2. Build numerous third places for them to meet spontaneously, frequently, for longer periods of time. My favorite outdoor version is the piazza. The most well-known indoor version is Starbucks, though I much rather prefer independent owners who care more about the local community.
3. Host lots of events in these third places, the piazza and the parks, especially if it involves the unifying vibes of music and art.
4. Establish ongoing community programs for the residents and workers that inspire them to collaborate, barter, network and find common recreational or work-related interests.
5. I could list about fifty more lines, but that's beyond the typical web viewer's attention span.
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Thursday, May 22
Communities vs. cliques
Community: A group of people living in the same locality; a group of people having common interests
Clique: A small exclusive group of friends or associates.
When we think of 'friends', we often think of them as cliques - people we regularly hang out with. However, being exclusive by definition, cliques also include country clubs and gangs. Either way, they typically aren't very diverse.
I believe a CoolTown will be more about community than cliques. Rather than asking the people in your clique what they'd like to do on Friday night week after week, more people will be choosing among myriad entertainment choices first, then meeting up spontaneously with people they know there. Why? In our evolution towards diversity, tolerance and choice and away from exclusivity, it's a natural progression. It encourages individuals to do what they're most passionate about, find out what's really out there and still have the best of friends, maybe even better ones. It's up to us to provide enough of those choices in the towns we build.
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Wednesday, May 21
Community in the office
Actually, the verdict isn't in yet, but the way I'm hoping to help catalyze a stronger sense of community at my workplace is using the same approach as where I live (see yesterday's blog). Just today I used the listserv to pick dates for our first happy hour, and half the entrepreneur tenants (eleven) are a go. June 3rd's our first happy hour, so I'll let you know then how it went.
As far as a common place that everyone can naturally gather, that's a strength of where I work at the shared suite of workspaces at the Affinity Lab. Simply put, the entire workplace is like a big living room, complete with a central lounging area of couches, big comfy chair and coffee table full of magazines.
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Tuesday, May 20
Do you know your neighbors?
There are seventy or so people who live in my building (image below), but for the first three or four years I hardly knew a soul. Today I know more than half of them by first name, and that all happened within a matter of months.
Here's my recipe to get to know your neighbors:
1. As painful as it is for some of us, you're going to have to go out of your way to get to know at least three or four of them. This forms the 'neighborhood core'.
2a. Plan an event like a happy hour in the most common area that everyone walks through. In our case, it was the lobby. Make sure the neighborhood core is there from the start. People attract people.
b. At the event, play music on a portable (I use my iBook) with decent speakers, something upbeat and energizing, like Marvin Gaye's Got To Give It Up.
c. Get an event sponsor for free beer and wine. Save the leftovers for the next quarterly event.
3. Get everyone to sign up on a building listserv. You can create a free one here. Use this to ask people to bring stuff to the next event, sell or give away things, or ask for help.
4. Reap the benefits! Let's see, since I've gotten to know my neighbors I've gotten a lot of free furniture and fix-it advice, along with numerous happy hours, social dinners, parties, snowball fights, movie nights, off-the-wall events and yes, a sense of community.
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Monday, May 19
Where is that elusive sense of community?
It's something many of us secretly ask ourselves, and there's even a book written about it. Is it possible to create a sense of community where none existed? History says yes, and hopefully we can use that to build better communities in the very near future.
This week I'll present places I've experienced that are known to have a strong sense of community, and how we plan to integrate that into CoolTowns. I'll start with Hawaii, since it's regarded by its residents as having an incredible sense of community, and it's also where I grew up.
In Hawaii, friends are called uncles and aunties, and strangers are viewed as friends. The ethnicities are so diverse and tolerant that it seems 90% of all the jokes told by comedians in Hawaii reflect cultural differences, something that is considered offensive (and sadly so) in the U.S. mainland. Spontaneous get-togethers to play ukulele and dance are the norm, people come early and leave late to help out, and even the Aloha Spirit is state law.
Where did this come from? Part of it is best explained by understanding Hawaii's plantation history in the first half of the 20th Century when corporate plantation owners lured thousands of workers from around the world (including my grandparents). What's noteworthy is that they were mixed together, all the better to fight with one another than to rebel against the plantation owners over what became false promises and inhumane working conditions. At first they did clash, but once they realized the futility of it all they began sharing their language (today's Pidgin English), food and eventually their resources to work together and gain their freedom.
So, using Hawaii as a model, start with diversity.
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