The past few years has seen an explosion in grassroots community movements
using IT to organize, grow and thrive in a world that’s now more global
than grassroots. The recent economic crisis has only stressed the
importance of re-localization, and community movements have never been
more important. The problem: people have become too globally focused
and have lost the social tools to connect locally. IT initiatives and
tools are needed more than ever to rediscover local connections and
community.
It may sound counter intuitive, but IT can help bring back the local
to community movements. I didn’t know many of the folks in my
neighborhood until I found and linked to them on Facebook, using the Neighborhoods
tool. I know it sounds ridiculous, but moving into a suburb a few years
ago meant that I met the neighbors who surrounded my house, but never
the ones a block over, or around the corner. And I certainly didn’t
know who shared my interests. Now, slowly that’s changing.
IT can do much more than reconnect people and interests locally.
Community greening requires the community to build knowledge, share
information and discuss initiaitives, ideas and plans. It’s all well
and good to meet monthly at the local community centre, but change
requires organization. Organization that’s much easier to achieve via
tools based in IT than in traditional, *analog* methods. No longer can
you paper a neighbourhood in flyers letting people know that there’s a
meeting, or an intiative or a community project that requires support
or inputs. That’s just not economically nor environmentally feasible
any more. Community movements need to use web based tools to achieve
broad based engagement.
Community Greening Initiatives are appearing in many municipal agendas. The Town of Aurora has developed a municipal plan that is focusing in reducing urban sprawl - one step towards creating a more sustainable community. The Town of Richmond Hill is supporting a new tool that helps promote carpooling fo residents of Markham and Richmond Hill. Wow! The 404-7 Smart Commute tool matches folks to locations for regular commuting requirements. The tool promotes community greening, reducing our carbon footprint, and individual reliance on fossil fuels - a triple whammy!!
It’s not just organized, municipal programs that are starting to
take off, individuals are making a difference greening their
communities. There’s nothing sweeter than spontaneous initiatives that
make the angels sing. Want to give away something as opposed to having
it end up in a landfill? Freecycle
gives you the tools to find a home for your used articles. Need to bone
up on your usable skills, or learn about sustainable living on a
personal level? There’s the Toronto Survivalist group using Meetup.com to engage and promote skills and learning.
Grassroots programs are popping up with a focus on community
greening - and all are using IT as a method for creating community
awareness, engage residents and even organize local volunteerism. GreenStreets Canada is planting neighborhood trees. Evergreen engages residents, promotes grassroots community initiatives and links folks to actions.
Even global IT greening tools can have impacts at a local level. Zerofootprint
has a slew of green calculators and social media tools focused at
education, advancement and promotion of reducing our carbon footprints.
There’s method to this madness. Leveraging IT tools to create and
promote grassroots, community greening initiatives is one of the main
ways that local sustainability
is going to be achievable quickly. Linking the like minded to support
change is one of the critical byproducts of IT innovations. Go ahead -
get local.
