City of Neighborhoods 2014 is slated for June 28th and the focus this year is all about celebration! We want to celebrate the every day actions of Tacoma’s citizens in making our neighborhoods the best they can be and strengthening neighborhood relationships.
One of the main tools we want to use to accomplish this is through sharing stories from neighbors and we need your help! We will post the stories here on this blog and be asking some of you to share at the conference! Please send us any stories you have of things like:
- Neighbors helping neighbors
- Neighbors knowing each other or prioritizing community in their neighborhood
- Neighbors sharing resources
- Neighbors creating neighborhood assets like community gardens, little free libraries, parks, murals, etc.
- Block parties
- Neighborhood potlucks or community dinners
- Random acts of kindness between neighbors
This is just a list to jog your memory, but don’t let it limit what you want to share. We just have one important criterion: the stories must feature neighbors in their own neighborhood. There are plenty of artists doing murals and community activists doing community projects in neighborhoods they otherwise don’t have a stake in. Those stories are encouraging too, but what we want here are stories of everyday people taking ownership of their own neighborhoods and going the extra mile for them. Stories that include people from outside the neighborhood joining in neighborhood projects are great too – just as long the project includes neighbors from the neighborhood itself.
One important note: in our hyper-mobile culture, someone may identify more strongly with a neighborhood that is different than the one they have a physical address in. That’s totally fine for these stories too!
The reason we think this will be such a powerful practice is because sometimes many of us don’t realize all the powerful actions our neighbors are doing, every day. In the spirit of the phrase small is beautiful, we want to highlight the power of caring for our neighborhoods and our neighborly relationships. Lets all be encouraged and help encourage one another through the sharing of stories happening all around us.
Submit your stories here or below in the comments!
City of Neighborhoods 2014 is slated for June 28th, from 9am – 4pm at the University of Puget Sound. Buy tickets here.
