This week, the team read about the idea of engagement and both the importance of it in a community, and the disconnect many citizens feel with their ability, or the value, of their engagement. While there is a notable amount of voting and volunteering, the idea of engagement goes beyond this and needs to include a longer term, broader sense of community. Democracy Collaborative works toward this idea by creating opportunities for community and economic development through shared ownership. The Land Trust Alliance also expands on this idea of shared ownership by creating a land trust to help protect collections of privately owned land from urbanization. The critical theme throughout the resources has been the many layers required to have real community engagement and the importance of ownership (as a sense, or literal) in engaging citizens in their community. This helps fulfill the need to make engagement a deeper and more ingrained aspect of being part of a community.
This week’s theme of Engaged citizens, centered around forming genuine and meaningful connections to the community and having “skin in the game” and caring about the happenings across the community. I think something that I found interesting this week was that, Gateway, in general, is disengaged. Rather than stopping there however, a deeper dive begins to shed additional light onto why the community isn’t very engaged. Every community around Gateway – Ivy City, Langdon, Fort Lincoln, etc. are all expanding rapidly and as such have active communities with active participants who are engaged in the community, directing it to a new direction. In Gateway, any new direction isn’t exactly desired. The citizens of Gateway are happy with their community enough to the point to resist outside development because nearby communities that are active, have pushed original citizens out of the community. Reflecting on this module, a simple question became obvious. How do communities balance the expanding activism that happens typically when new citizens come into the community with managing the expansion and development of the community and ensure older citizens don’t get pushed aside? For Gateway, it makes sense that they don’t want to be an active “up-and-coming” neighborhood because it could threaten their existence within the neighborhood. However, it is obvious, given the last 5 modules, that Gateway needs resources, food access, healthy access, and more to fully achieve human flourishing. The problem is, once a community flourishes, it doesn’t stay a secret for long. Newcomers desire to move into the community increases demand, rent or buy new places, and therefore, shorts supply. Basic economics tells us that this property becomes more valuable and those who cannot afford this anymore have a choice to make – either deal with the increased cost or move out. Typically, the later is chosen, ripping communities apart and relocating them. Sure, the community that emerges is a more engaged community but at what cost?
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