Institute For The Future

Local Communities of Purpose, USA, Bay Area, Jeffery and Quesada Gardens 12/18/08

Context:

Jeffery is in his mid-forties, lives in a newly renovated Victorian in an infamously embattled neighborhood of San Francisco with a friend whom he met through professional networking circles.  (They now collaborate on the housemate’s social entrepreneurial business).  He's lived in this neighborhood for the last ten years, before that living in a string of neighborhoods the fit his ideals for racial and economic diversity and social need, moving just ahead of the waves of gentrification over the past decades.  

Although Jeffery seems to be involved in everything, his income stream is unstable at best.  After a steady job in program operations for a large and reputable non-profit, he cashed out his retirement to focus on the work in his own neighborhood and on a passion project of designing and manufacturing “progressive value” based clothing.  The latter has been slow going as he put his business on hold to re-organize the textile trade association in the city to create a more supportive environment for his venture.  What income he gets comes from stipends in the grants he writes for neighborhood and community organizations, and soon a small stream from the neighborhood group as it formalizes and incorporates as a non-profit.  He estimates his time is divided about evenly between neighborhood and community level groups and the city and business ventures. 

Jeffery’s life is really local; increasingly he is able to stay physically in the neighborhood and spend most of his money in the neighborhood.   While he usually has 1-5 phone calls and face to face meetings a day with other people involved in various community groups, city officials, grantors, he generally pushes for them to come to him in Bayview to challenge their assumptions about the place and show them around.  Very occasionally he’ll do a conference call with his partners for the new neighborhood portal site.  He starts his mornings with emails, a ritual he feels is “less effective by the month,” as others tune out to  his long emails bent on transparency and he is overwhelmed by volume.  He then uses the downtime between meetings to blog for the neighborhood and community sites, return calls from journalist, neighbors looking for conflict mediation, other neighborhood organizers asking for advice.  For instance, the other day he got a call from a woman in another city in the state who was having trouble with getting city permits for a garden project. He shared with her detailed practices for consensus planning, inventorying assets, dealing with competing city departments, and gaining media coverage.  

Domain context:

It seems there is hardly a non-profit group in Bayview with which Jeffery does not have some connection.  Most of his participation is light however:  for the vast majority of groups he may sit on the board, give a presentation at a meeting, give principle organizers advice or assistance on an odd task.  He might be invited to a fundraiser or a meeting of a philanthropic group. (he gave us a list of 23 groups and organizations, and mentioned another 5 or 6 that intersected on issues or in city bureaucracy; including his past involvement in family violence programs is “groups ad organizations” sound like a directory of community activism in that part of the city).  The bulk of his activities, his primary responsibilities, lay with three groups however.  1) Quesada Gardens, which he asked us, like him, to treat by name, which has been an informal neighborhood organization for the last six years and is currently in the process of formalizing into a non-profit 501c3.  2) Bayview Footprints, a “community portal” project that is trying to pool digital resources with a shared mailing list, website, social networking service, etc.  3) The textile association mentioned above, a resurrected version of the moribund garment lobby in the city. His goal is to build the brand of SF as a progressive city and make value based manufacturing and local consumption viable.  This last one we won’t treat as much… although he holds that it is philosophically parallel to the others, QG and BF are more directly related to the domain.

Quesada Gardens started with a neighbor planting flowers on a median strip and in the strips of earth by people’s driveways.  The just-so story is that admiring the flowers gave people a reason to congregate outside, a focal point for positive pride in the physical place.  This segued quickly into a discussion of why they did not do so more often:  a very real concern for physical security: fear of shootings and stabbings that they had all witnessed if not experienced.  The first meeting occurred in a neighbor’s back yard; Jeffery, mobilizing his experience as a community organizer, went around with a clipboard collecting names, phone numbers and email addresses, and a list of concerns, goals and individual and collective assets (strengths that could be mobilized to address the concerns and meet the goals).  At that meeting they chose their name, Quesada Gardens, based on the garden that was now growing in size and participation on the median strip.  There was a keen interest to take visible, collective action, since they had all been taking private, reactive actions like calling the police, but to little effect.  At the same time, identification and fear of retributive violence was (and is) still a concern:  their second meeting in a local store front was very uncomfortable, as people were afraid to be seen from the street congregating and organizing. 

Jeffery drew parallels between this and the differing dynamics on the list serve vs the blog, quesadagardensblog.blogspot.com, and other open web platforms.  While people use the list serve actively, bringing up issues and addressing them in fast-paced conversations, the neighborhood members have been reticent to comment on the blog posts that Jeffery writes, and shy in posting their own content.  While some of this is technical comfort, Jeffery thinks much of it is the public-facing nature of the group.  He has the same concerns about the social network Bayview Footprints has launched, bayviewfootprints.ning.com, and it currently being used mostly by a few heads of other nonprofits in the area.  He found the service through the recommendation of a friend involved in an active online group of artists of color.  There are groups on Facebook and Myspace which some local young people have supported, but so far none of them have shown interest in really driving them. The list-serve, phone tree and physical get-togethers still form the mainstay of the neighborhood centric communication. They have a google calendar embedded in the blog, and while Jeffery makes the log-in available regularly, most people still ask him to post things on their behalf. 

Several boxes of Christmas letters, designed by another resident, lay on Jeffery’s table, where a group of residents had gathered to hand-address and sign them before they were sent to supporters and other contacts.  Snail mail breaks through the noise of email and other electronic communications, and hand-addressing envelopes is key to that strategy.  Plus, the act of addressing them is another community-building opportunity for shared time together.  Jeffery’s parlor hosted the computer where residents and interns from local non-profits and universities designed fliers, letters and posters for the street’s efforts.  (video of tour)

* Services for local communities should support “nimbleness” – be able to capitalize on the skills present in the people participating, and have a low transfer barrier if a person moves or decreases participation and needs to hand off

* Local communities are being defined on increasingly fine-grained scales, in neighborhoods, within and around houses.  These fine grainded “local” networks may come into conflic with, and need tools to navigate “local” governments and institutions. 

*Public/private visibility filtering remains a key axis for maintaining participation and trust—and losing it.