Are you an artist, neighborhood organizer, or interested in finding creative ways to engage with your community?
We’re working with the Northside Residents Redevelopment Council (NRRC) on a new public engagement project designed to creatively connect North Minneapolis residents with the opportunities and resources that NRRC has to offer, and with each other. The Neighborhood Cart (working title) is a mobile neighborhood engagement cart that invites passersby to meet their neighbors and to engage in creative, playful, and accessible activities. The cart will be staffed by NRRC board members, community residents, and neighborhood leaders, who will dispense healthy treats and information about NRRC programs and resources, while also inviting creative interaction, face-to-face conversation, and storytelling.
We believe neighborhoods are not only the sum of their roads, schools, and shopping malls; they’re the sum of their relationships. NRRC has been engaged in the work of building relationships with and among neighbors since 1969, yet reaching out and engaging a broad population of residents and sustaining that engagement remains a challenge. Traditional meeting schedules and structures, as well as perceptions of the accessibility and relevance of neighborhood engagement can be a barrier to broader visibility and participation in neighborhood organizing efforts. We seek to address this by creating a direct line of contact with and between neighbors in a way that is creative, playful, accessible, and fun.
Please take a few moments to provide some information to inform this project by answering a few questions here. It shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes. And THANK YOU!
![Let the editing/writing/compiling begin! [Photo by Zoe Prinds-Flash]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lumxyzzChw1qbogafo1_1280.jpg)
![Recently we had friends over to sit around a fire in our back yard. Money is scarce these days, and everyone we know seems exhausted, so we invited a handful of people to take a break with us.
We talked about a lot of things, including our jobs or lack of jobs; our families; the art and community projects we were excited about or working on; stories in the local and national news; movies we’d seen recently; the things we were worried about; and what other plans we had for the weekend.
Eventually we started talking about the Occupy Wall Street protests spreading across the country. Colin had been closely watching the stories about the protests percolate through the media and social networking sites for weeks, and was feeling invigorated by the possibility that the frame through which many people see our public lives and financial realities might actually be shifting. Others in the circle were less enthusiastic, citing personal experiences they’d had with organizers of protests, some of whom seemed less interested in empowering others or changing systems than in making their own political declarations and propaganda.
Hesitations aside, we were all in support of the Occupy movement, and most of us had been to one or two demonstrations in the recent past, or to visit the People’s Plaza. We’d shared news about the movement with friends online, but agreed that the largest impact of this movement on our lives right now was not something happening in public or on Facebook, but in the private conversations around our dinner tables, at work with our colleagues, or in phone calls with our families back home.
We were finally able to talk about money and power without feeling ashamed by how little of it we have; or how much debt we’re carrying from credit cards or college; or our health issues and experiences with public assistance programs; or how little we know about the financial system and its inner workings; or our parents and their realities as they age out of the workforce; or the feelings of shame, and fear, and uncertainty that many of us have carried with us into adulthood.
We realize now that we’ve been conditioned to think of these things as personal responsibilities and private concerns, as something to hide from view or to struggle through with only our closest friends - and now, with the flood of images and stories from the 99% - we’re finding words to describe how we feel, and are hungry for other ways of participating in this conversation, and in this economy. We have lots of questions for each other, and few venues to gather and talk, to connect with others outside our social circles, and to teach and learn from one another.
That’s why a group of us are organizing FINANCIAL ENGAGEMENT // A PUBLIC THING on November 5th.
Our goals are simple: to provide a space for public conversation about financial independence and interdependence, and any other questions and ideas that might have emerged as a result of recent events - be they big-picture issues, tactical or strategic, or personal experiences that we want to share with others.
We chose to do this at Peavey Plaza because that place has the feeling of a large urban room, with lots of space for smaller, more intimate conversations. It also sits in the shadow of an arts organization (Orchestra Hall) rather than a Government building that some of us have spent way too much time waiting inside. Peavey Plaza seemed a more appropriate venue for this gathering, which we hope will be inviting and inspiring, and generated by the people who attend.
We’re doing this on the day that has been designated by some as “Bank Transfer Day” because we see this as an opportunity to take a collective action, and then, to come together to talk, listen, make plans, connect, and to build on the movement that many of us have only participated in online.
We’re hoping that afterward, when the conversations have come to a close (for now), people who feel inspired to continue this work in public will walk to the OccupyMN site at the Peoples’ Plaza to take part in activities there; or that they’ll continue the conversations with friends, family, colleagues or neighbors elsewhere, which is also a great outcome!
Artists and other documentarians will be embedded in these small group conversations to help record and tell the story of what was discussed and generated. A group of us will be collecting these stories and documents, and using them as the basis for a publicly-generated newspaper that will be designed, printed, and distributed widely on “Black Friday” - the largest shopping day of the year, and the kick-off to the holiday shopping season. For many this time of year is a time of anxiety, worry about money, and also, a time of gathering. We hope to provide a collectively-authored resource for those interested in engaging these ideas and experiences in new ways.
The content of this newspaper will be determined by those who show up on November 5th, and the questions and resources they bring to this gathering. If you want to volunteer to be a documentarian at this event, sign-up here.
We hope you’ll join us! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us!
hello [at] worksprogress [dot] org
Thanks to our collaborators on this project: Sarah Peters, Molly Priesmeyer (Good Work Group), and the other artists, designers & writers who are helping out with A PUBLIC THING.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltqflbCdZP1qbogafo1_1280.jpg)
