Smart Communities

Happy Holidays -- See You Next Year

The Smart Communities blog will be taking a much-needed break in the last week of December.  We'll return in the first week of January when we will hit a triumphant mark of 500 posts since this blog started.  A pretty amazing feat and one that will be marked by our second edition of the Most Engaging Blogs.

Happy holidays to all our readers and see you in 2007.

Cook's Training at Triad Community Kitchen

You'll want to make a note of this smart idea.  The Triad Community Kitchen in Winston-Salem, NC just opened on December 6th and will be training approximately 100 unemployed, homeless, or poor people to cook meals at the kitchen.  This idea arose out of a need for more cooks to process a surge in donated food that would otherwise go bad if not cooked and immediately chilled.  Training is made possible by the involvement of the Triad Chef Association but involvement with these new cooks goes beyond just meal preparation and extends to other aspects of being ready for the workplace.  Job placement, the Triad Chef Association website indicates, is part of the program as well.

As an interesting sidenote to this story, the New York Times published an article this week about the efforts of one community kitchen chef who goes beyond the call of duty. Soup kitchen chefs, it seems, do not have to toil in obscurity.

Kudos to the folks who put the Triad Community Kitchen together, this sounds like a real win-win situation for everyone involved and makes for a beautiful holiday story to end 2006 on the Smart Communities blog.

More on Kalamazoo's Promise

Back in March of this year we blogged on Kalamazoo's Promise and the impact it was having on that community.  National Public Radio has also kept up with the initiative and reports that it is having an unexpected positive impact on the community's economy including significant growth in interest for realty.  Your computer must have RealPlayer or Windows Media Player to listen to this downloadable broadcast.

Say Goodbye to Hopeulikit, GA?

Another story from National Public Radio (NPR) today -- this one on the tiny town of 100 in Georgia called Hopeulikit.  Located about 6 miles from Statesboro, GA and a little over 50 from Savannah, GA the little burg of Hopeulikit, and others of small communities like it, has been officially wiped off the map by the state of Georgia.  The community itself is comprised of 800 acres of land named for a Big Band-era dance hall that once graced the area.

This could be seen as a real blow to the chances of a number of Georgia's small communities to attract attention to their potential, or it could be an opportunity.  I could definitely see Georgia's small communities banding together to create a map that leaves out major metropolitan areas and strictly focuses-on the smaller, rural areas that so many Americans call home.  Ideally, a map like this could be used to organize something along the lines of what the Rural Safari Bus Tours do in Chester, England.

It is entirely possible that Georgia's smaller communities are fine with being removed from the official state map.  In case they're not fine with this development, I hope this serves as a suggestion for putting them back on the map!

The Wary Philanthropist

Americans are famously generous with their time and monetary donations, particularly around the holidays.  More than ever, though, charitable givers are wary of donating to large national organizations and are giving dollars closer to home.  The Washington Post reports that the world of charitable giving has changed somewhat as a result.  For instance, there are catalogs that create lists of smaller, less well-known, nonprofits.  Others have taken matters into their own hands and started giving circles or Impact 100 organizations.  A good example of a giving circle comes out of Arizona where the social and charitable aspects merge to make donating time and money an even more pleasurable experience.  An Impact 100 group is the same idea as a giving circle but with a more specific focus, 100 people pool their resources and each commit $1,000 to charity.  The 100 decide as a group the charity that will receive the $100,000 donation.

If you're planning to donate charitably this winter then you may want to check out this brief article from the Richmond Times Dispatch which offers tips to charitable givers on how they can donate with confidence.  Additional tips can be found on this Washington Post blog.

Benchmarking Pittsburgh

I wish all newspapers could do this.  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette publishes data which demonstrates how the city rates against comparably-sized urban areas in the U.S. across a broad spectrum of measures including downtown office vacancies, homicides, home values, roadway congestion, and others.  Granted, this is Census data so it is a few years old, but making this data public and prominent could add much to public deliberation.  Adding additional measures from other datasets would no doubt help but this is a great idea any way you cut it.

Transcript of EdWeek Chat Now Posted

Education Week had an online Q&A with some family and education experts on Friday, the transcript of that conversation is now posted on the EdWeek website.  The subject of the talk was the role of education in helping children from low-income become high-income adults.

A number of questions related to the question of helping students become ready for the workforce.  There were some interesting answers, although nothing that might be described as a final answer to the question of "what works."  One of the best answers was provided by Cecilia Rouse, professor of economics and public affairs, who was cautious in asserting that high school programs that offer work experiences improve "labor market outcomes" and don't appear to affect the choice of young people to attend college.  The transcript has some discussion by people in the field about what is currently being tried and what might work.  A worthwhile read for those interested in the connection between education, the labor force, and communities.

Northern Montana Hopes a Wider Road will Help

Northern Montana is hoping that by widening their major east-west transportation route, Highway 2, they will attract additional business development and staunch the outward exodus of residents.  An article in the New York Times on this idea doesn't take a terribly promising tone and perhaps not without good cause.  A limited infrastructure can definitely keep economic development at bay, manufacturers may be unwilling to locate factories in areas with two-lane highways or limited north-south transportation for instance.

The road is only part of the equation, though, as northern Montana  has to find some way to build an economy that will make that new road a truly sound investment.  This is not to say that challenged economies shouldn't make infrastructure investments, there's no question they should, but these sorts of investments have to be matched by improvements in things like human capital and the way in which communities perceive and promote their assets.  It sounds like Montana has some assets it can build from including a fine environment for hunters and an emerging economy from new energy sources.  Hopefully it can use these sorts of assets to build a fine economic complement to an enlarged Highway 2.

Online Charting and Graphing Tools

There's an interesting website called Swivel that allows users to upload data and produce charts or graphs with it.  If you want to share your data with the public then the website is free.  If you want to keep your data private then there's a fee.  This is a relatively new venture that has some promise for people who don't usually work with data and find the production of charts and graphs to be tedious, technically complex, and overwhelming.  The good news is that they already have some cool charts to share such as this one comparing trends in per capita wine consumption (the red line) with acts of violent crime (the green line.)

Before getting too excited about these trends note that this is not demonstrating causation, just an provocative correlation.

The bad news is that as of today there are few offerings on the site which relate to community development.  This could certainly change with time, though, and the site could become much more relevant to our niche in the world in just a few months.

An Unlikely Source Supporting Volunteerism

There are lots of places that encourage people to donate their time to others through volunteer efforts but this one caught me a little offguard -- The Learning Channel (TLC).  An ad on TLC brought this to my attention, apparently the channel will make an effort to reach out to viewers throughout the month of December and encourage them to volunteer.  TLC has started a website in support of this effort and has some classy spokespersons including Stacy London from What Not to Wear.  A month-long effort may not seem like much but it is more than most other channels have attempted and the Hands On Network, a partner with TLC in this promotion, does a good job of linking citizens with local volunteer opportunities.