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Working Together

through Challenging Times

Community Outreach of Our United Villages hosted an ongoing series of Community Conversations entitled Working Together through Challenging times.  These conversations provided free venues for people to explore together what we can do as a community to support each other through challenging times.  From December 08-May 09, we hosted 10 conversations in locations throughout the Portland metro-area.  Listed below are a few of the ideas shared at the conversations. 

What practices have previous generations used to work together through challenging times?

  • Thriftiness
  • Taking families in during hardships
  • Seeking counsel from community leaders or elders
  • Planted, harvested, and preserved food together
  • Gathered around shared values
  • Neighbors provided child care for one another
  • Participated in local schools and churches
  • A shared pot of money for a community to draw from in times of need

What are the benefits of building positive relationships with your neighbors?

  • Celebrations, pot-lucks, BBQs, and block parties
  • Collaborations of ideas
  • Knowing someone is looking out for me, trust, and safety
  • Friendly atmosphere, socializing, and enrichment
  • Diversity broadens your perspective
  • Caring and help
  • Borrowing a cup of sugar
  • Sharing meals
  • Finding out about events
  • Reduces stress
  • Combining our resources
  • Sharing tools, produce, and internet
  • Sense of community
  • Hope and harmony
  • House sitting
  • Sharing fruits and vegetables

What can we do as a community to support each other?

  • Learn cultural traditions and customs
  • Transform the tone of the news media
  • Gather food that grocery stores or restaurants will throw away
  • Teach people how to can and preserve food
  • Collect fallen fruit from trees
  • Increase access to resources for everyone
  • Inventory neighbors skills for trading skills/services
  • Centralized location for community announcements
  • Start community-owned energy
  • Create a safe system for ride sharing
  • Create more safe public spaces for people to talk with one another
  • Take a dozen eggs to a neighbor
  • Share food
  • Open our homes to each other
  • Start relationships without assumptions
  • Turn front lawns into community gardens
  • Introduce ourselves to our neighbors
  • Get involved in my neighborhood association
  • Shop and dine within our immediate community
  • Host a clothing exchange or community clothes closet
  • Plan potlucks or social gatherings
  • Buy food in bulk with neighbors
  • Trade rides for babysitting
  • Hand down children’s clothing, books, and toys
  • Share knowledge of local resources
  • Host a homework club for school age kids
  • Host movie and game nights to cut expenses
  • Start a parent support group
  • Host cultural awareness nights
  • Create a neighborhood phone tree
  • Start a neighborhood compost area

We also hosted an Idea Development Plan Workshop.  At the workshop, people worked in small groups to further develop a project idea.  Some of the project ideas included:

  • Creating a toolkit for sharing stories as a way to get to know neighbors better
  • Hosting craft nights for neighbors to socialize and teach each crafts
  • Creating a neighborhood self-sufficiency network based around food
  • To bridge the information gap and engage a diverse audience in issues of sustainability
  • To create a peer-to-peer support system for overcoming isolation

Based on the themes that bubbled up to the top, we created Resource Lists on various subjects:

 

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