As our existing forums in the UK keep plugging along, I wanted to
share some in-depth lessons from our grant-funded work in lower
income, high immigrant, "Neighbors Forums" in the U.S..
In short, "Neighbours Forums" that embrace "community life exchange"
(e.g. who can recommend a good plumber, discussion about crime
instances, sharing tips on pre-schools etc.) are extremely popular. By
embracing forums that are very very local (~10,000 population areas)
you get 85% very non-political very neighbourly community building
exchange and the 15% on local "issues" then reaches 10x the number of
people. Some of our forums are approach 1,000 members (like
http://e-democracy.org/se ) or 25% of households! (P.S. In general,
most local people hate city-wide forums focused exclusively on
politics because of the often negative loudest voices. They max out at
1% of households.)
The _problem_ with both neighbour connecting and online political
participation is that those "who already show up" are dominating
online (there are many surveys now that quantify this). We love
serving ALL communities and volunteers make it happen, but real
inclusion in lower income/highly diverse area takes real resources.
Luckily we've had pilot funding from the Ford Foundation (see
evaluation links below) and now a major $625,000 US grant to recruit
10,000 ~daily participants across 16 forums in St. Paul, Minnesota
over the next three years. So, what does this mean for our UK
communities? I don't know. The real question is what does the
opportunity to make inclusive neighbourhood networking a priority mean
to you? What might you do to secure either local funding or leverage
existing resources to make two-way online neighbourly engagement a
reality _for all_ in your community? In times of austerity this might
actually be one the most cost-effective community engagement/community
capacity unleashing investments.
Ultimately our forumla comes down to two success factors - one
volunteer willing to be the *active* forum host or manager and an
effort to sign people up in-person on paper forms at as many community
events as possible (particularly those that attract diverse community
members). We've not seen any evidence that _inclusive_ outreach will
be done exclusively by volunteers and we've found that the online
dreams of "build they will come" cause people with resources to simply
miss the mark. Most people are too shy to ask people to sign-up on
paper and therefore the potential for proven online inclusion is lost.
So, funding either for dedicated people to do outreach or orgs willing
to assign existing staff to do this work is required and it does work!
Anyway, we sincerely appreciate our UK communities and forums and hope
that by sharing this 60 page evaluation of our core work these days on
inclusion, opportunities to extend this fundamentally important work
in the UK via our existing networks will emerge. - Steven Clift,
E-Democracy.org