Community – Page 2 – Kristen Baumlier

Category: Community

Nametag Tag and The Social Interaction of Nametags

Posted on July 7, 2013July 9, 2013 by Kbaumlier

I recently read about Nametag day on the Awesome Foundation’s website, which was a project where nametags were given out in New York City on the street on June 1^st of this year. For the project, teams of four to six volunteers went to busy parks and intersections with a sign and handing out nametags. People passing by were told, “It’s nametag day, would you like a free nametag?”

Thousands of nametags were given out, and participants who sent in pictures and messages found that they got into more conversations with others on their commute, met their neighbors, and felt different while walking in the city.

Maybe you’ll get in a conversation, maybe a dozen — about someone’s awesome shoes or nice haircut, or a topic in the news. Maybe you will meet a neighbor. Or maybe you’ll just go through your day looking at our city of eight million people a little bit differently.

I sent a message to the team behind Nametag, to find out how many nametags were given out. For now I can report what they have on their website, between 30,000 – or up to 200,000 were given out.

On the blog of the site, I read about Scott Ginsberg, who was involved with the project, who believes that, “Everyone should wear nametags, all the time, everywhere, forever.” Ginsberg has been wearing a nametag 24/7, for the past 4,600 days. (even to bed!) His social experiment started as a fun experiment but later evolved into an urban legend, world record and cultural phenomenon. Ginsberg has traveled to hundreds of cities, a dozen countries and four continents and reports that he has met tens of thousands of people by being the guy who wears a nametag. He has a video channel, and has written a dozen books about social interaction.

As a spokeperson for Nametag Day 2013, he shared some of his insights which include the ideas that nametags promote:

The End of Strangers
The End of Exclusion
The End of Social Conflict
The End of Dishonesty
The End of Disengagement
The End of Incivility
The End of Neglect

You can read more about his ideas, and about Nametag Day on the project blog and website.

Mark your calendar – Nametag Day for 2014 is set for Saturday June 7^th. Get your nametag and sharpie ready…
Image Source:
nametagday.com

Links:

Host a Neighborday Celebration on April 27th

Posted on March 22, 2013March 24, 2013 by Kbaumlier

How well do you know your neighbors? I know some of my neighbors first names, what cars they drive, and what kind of dog they have. I don’t know where anyone works, what people care about, or really much more than what I see when I walk past their yards.

Today with the increase of “social” networking tools, it makes it easier to not do in person contact with others around us.

GOOD is a global community of people and organizations working towards individual and collective progress. On the Good.is neighboring webpage it reads, “What might we be missing? Collaborators, friends, emergency contacts, sugar? What does this mean for society?

As a kickoff to improve cities and communities, the GOOD community is starting by reconnecting neighborhoods. On April 27, anyone can host a Neighborday party (either big or small) that might be a barbeque, having your front door open, or a neighborhood event. The goal is for one thousand small-scale gatherings around the world to celebrate “neighboring.”

I recently picked up the recent issue of GOOD magazine, and there is a poster in it designed by Frnk Chimero that is meant to be posted on your door on Neighborday – to let your neighbors know that you are participating.

If you want to get involved, you can go to the good.is neighboring page, and sign up to host a Neighborday on April 27. You can get information about the event, and also get inspiration for the day.

Image Source:
www.good.is/neighboring

Links:

www.good.is/neighboring

Boston Tree Party: Planting One Tree at a Time

Posted on January 20, 2013January 28, 2013 by Kbaumlier

The Boston Tree Party is an urban agriculture project where a diverse coalition of organizations, institutions, and communities from across the Greater Boston Area coming together in support of “Civic Fruit.” The goal of the group is to plant fruit trees in civic space and promote civic engagement. For the project, each community commits to planting and caring for a pair of heirloom apple trees. Apple trees must be planted in heterogeneous pairs (two different varieties of apples must be planted together) in order to cross-pollinate and bear fruit. The Boston Tree Party takes these trees as inspiration.

Together, these trees form a decentralized public urban orchard. As a conceptual art project, the Boston Tree Party explores the issues of food access; health; environmental stewardship; biodiversity; public space; and civic engagement.

The first apple orchard in the American Colonies was planted by William Blackstone near Boston in 1623. The oldest variety of apple in the United States, the Roxbury Russet, was developed in Roxbury, near Boston in the 1630s.

The planting campaign launched on April 10, 2011, and the first pair of apple trees were planted on the Rose Kennedy Greenway. Later this year, the first group of participating Tree Planting Delegations each received a Tree Party Kit. These 37 Delegations consisted of 55 organizations ranging from schools to assisted living centers, synagogues to churches, and neighborhood groups to hospitals. The Kit allowed each community to design and create its own festive Tree Planting Party tailored to its own needs and interests. All across the city communities planted the seeds of Civic Fruit.

In 2012, 18 new Delegations, consisting of 23 communities and organizations, joined the party. A new updated map shows where the apples have been planted around the city, and you also can read the full list of Delegations who have participated since the project started.

Image Source:

http://www.bostontreeparty.org/

Links:

http://www.bostontreeparty.org/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9ZEfvrgB78E

The Everything Roof – A New Community Food Project in Toronto

Posted on November 16, 2012November 20, 2012 by Kbaumlier

Where can you grow your own food, compost, do upcycling projects, support education and awareness about sustainability, and grow food on top of a building? In Toronto you soon will be able to do these things at a new center called The Everything Roof, which is being created by a group called The About Face Collective.

The About Face Collective was started by Natalie Boustead and Lauren Pirie, in collaboration with other community members. The group consists of people who engage with art, sustainability, food security, health, and with the city. In Toronto, there is not a historical tradition of valuing community and public space.

The Everything Roof was developed as a platform to showcase creative approaches to sustainability and community space and to show how involving artists and designers in community projects can be a benefit to a city. The project is unique because it incorporates art and youth as well as sustainable urban food production. . Together, the group developed a vision of a creative community space that would promote healthy, sustainable lifestyles as well as integrating artistic and sustainable approaches. To do this, they are collaborating with other non-profit programs and groups and did a campaign to get support for the space.

The black tar roof of the spaces of the project will be replaced with green space, which will create plant life and food in the urban environment. The food that’s produced will be used on-site in educational programs and workshops, and it also will be sold at the on-site weekly office market and ground-floor cafe at the Center for Social Innovation.

Currently The Everything Roof is still in development and aims to be operational by summer, 2012. If you are interested in learning more about the space, you can email them at aboutface@aboutfacecollective.com with “Volunteer” in the subject line. You can also visit their website and check out their fun video on Vimeo.

Image Source:
http://www.aboutfacecollective.com/
Links:

http://www.aboutfacecollective.com/

http://vimeo.com/35942278

Sunday Soup: Creative and Tasty Fundraising for Art Projects

Posted on November 3, 2012November 4, 2012 by Kbaumlier

Why not eat some vegetable soup and support local art? Sunday Soup is a quarterly community meal, which is an event that supports artist initiatives and community projects in Chicago through a grant raised by the meal. For each dinner, head chef Eric May and his friends prepare a soup and other dishes using local ingredients. The meal is served family style and costs $15 per person.

The money from ticket sales (minus the cost of food) becomes a grant for a creative project. At the dinner, diners vote on proposals for creative projects that are displayed or presented at the meal. The project that gets the most votes gets the money from the Sunday Soup event. At the dinner past grantees will give updates, and there are sometimes readings or music performed.
Past presentations have included a art historical lecture on the aesthetic practice of walking by critic Lori Waxman, a meal by San Francisco underground restaurant chef Leif Hedendal, and Portlander Marc Moscato’s documentary on Chicago’s Dill Pickle Club. The event creates a participatory and transparent method of funding arts and culture. It also is a way to support dialogue about community, art, and funding. Who doesn’t have great conversation while eating a tasty shared meal?

Sunday Soup last occurred on Sunday May 6, 2012, and The Prison-Neighborhood Arts Project (P-NAP) received the most votes at the dinner. Prison-Neighborhood Arts Project is a new initiative that offers visual arts classes to men at Stateville prison and produces exhibitions of the resulting works in neighborhood galleries and community centers on a bi-annual basis. The Sunday Soup grant will support P-NAP to buy books for a new fall course in creative writing and literature. At the end of the fall semester, an exhibition of artworks and readings of student writing will be held in Chicago.

The project is a way to directly support projects made by individuals, which can be difficult to fund. Currently public money in general for the arts is minimal, and projects done by individuals are often funding by crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. Artists and cultural producers have to often spend a lot of time putting a project into a definable category, and spending significant time in creating online campaigns.

The Sunday Soup grant is a simple and direct process, making Sunday Soup a direct and broad way for artists to potentially find support for projects. Some past projects that have been funded include Gabriel Saloman’s Spartacus School of Passing Time, AREA Chicago, Geraldine Juarez’s Tanda Foundation, Joseph Del Pesco’s Black Market Type project, and many others.

The project was initiated by InCUBATE in 2007 and restarted this past year after a two year break. Sunday Soup has helped support an international network of micro-granting community meals. Over 61 “sister projects” are currently in operation. You can read about the project, funded projects, and contact them if you want to participate or do your own soup events. The website has links to other artist-run funding projects, so you can connect with others in cities across the U.S.

Image Source:
http://www.sundaysoup.org

Links:

http://www.sundaysoupchicago.org/

http://www.sundaysoup.org