Saturday, October 26, 2013

30 Ideas in 30 Days: #1 Think Incrementally

30 Ideas in 30 Days

Now that we've covered our 30 ideas, it's time to get out and Build a Better Block!

Idea #1: Think Incrementally

So you want to change your neighborhood? Ok. Just go out and do it. Worried about finances, zoning, rules, and regulations getting in the way? No problem. Get together a bunch of citizens and just make good things happen. The results will speak for themselves. This is increasingly becoming the ethos of a whole new set of related movements seeking to enrich places all over the planet.

Jay Walljasper in All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons documented a number of trends reshaping the economy, environment, the internet, democracy, and our communities in a positive way. Walljasper begins by defining the commons as what we share. More precisely he says:
Commons: What we share. Creations of both nature and society that belong to all of us equally and should be maintained for future generations.
Several principles for protecting shared resources have been advanced by Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Economics. These include:
  1. Define clear group boundaries.
  2. Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions.
  3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.
  4. Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.
  5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members' behavior.
  6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.
  7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution.
  8. Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.
As we've written before, this incremental approach is nothing new. The National Main Street Center through their Four-Point Approach has been advocating for incremental change through the work of volunteers on grassroots committees for decades. A rising tide of philanthropic activity nationally and internationally seeks to enrich communities using resources from inside and outside. So many of the tactics we seek to use for Better Block from street trees, to mobile vendors, and pop-ups are all incremental by design.

What makes this moment unique is that many forces are coming together all at once. Technology is providing unprecedented opportunities and tools to bring people together through social networking and crowd technologies. Great ideas now have the potential to spread far more rapidly than ever before. A movement started in Dallas is now having an impact in Appalachian Kentucky. At what other time would something like this ever been possible? Finally, the focus on the commons and all that we share is a concept with the power to bring people together all over the world around a similar theme - how do we make our place on the world a little bit better?

To close, never again should huge budgets or big plans get in the way of what can be done right now. For communities willing to think in $500 increments and about what can be accomplished in two weeks or less, the opportunity to bring transformative change for our communities is always present. We have the Orton Family Foundation and the CommunityMatters initiative to thank for sharing this important lesson with us. Power2Give and the Humana Foundation helped us to get that much further through their generous support. None of this would have ever been possible without the initial support from the Appalachian Regional Commission by way of a Flex-E Grant administered by the Brushy Fork Institute at Berea College.

Taken together Middlesborough has proven what many places are beginning to find - that citizen action is the surest and only way to bring about positive change and to generate true and lasting success for our community or any community for that matter. We hope our work plants the seed for long term change in our community and inspires people all over the world to take similar action for the betterment of their towns.

Better Block Middlesborough was held from October 25-27, 2013, in Middlesborough, Kentucky. To help with planning for future events like this, please consider making a donation today!

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