safety Archives - ChangingMedia

May 16

Vision Driven Change

By Adam Conway | Health, The Global Is Local | 2 Comments

A few nights ago my wife and I had a conversation with our friend Peter. In contrast to our method of deciding our fate (last minute panic combined with procrastination and our desire to live in the moment), Peter was describing himself as vision-driven in his decision making process. By coincidence, the following morning I sat among a large group, including my fellow ChangeEngine blogger Scott Burkholder, loosely organized around the concepts of social entrepreneurship and a vague but optimistic vision of a better city.

These conversations have given me pause for thought, and to consider the role of this social innovation/social change blog platform. Our group of authors approaches the challenge of promoting positive social change from a variety of perspectives, and most of us have personal investment in the projects and programs that we write about.

I’ve occasionally thought that the quote attributed to Ghandi on a million self-satisfied bumper stickers — “Be the change you want to see in the world” — might be an appropriate mission statement for ChangeEngine. I looked up the phrase and found that he has been misquoted for the purposes of bumperstickerability. As corrected by the New York Times:

If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.”

Not surprisingly, Ghandi is a smidge more complex and a tad more profound than the sentiment captured on a bumper sticker.

My conversation with Peter and the breakfast group the following morning centered around the potential for individuals and small groups to generate substantial change. Both interactions emphasized the importance of envisioning a better place, even if the precise vision of a better future is vague. In a way, it doesn’t really matter. The effort counts.

Making an effort toward positive change almost certainly shifts the expectations, changes the conversation, and re-frames the possibilities for a community in need of transformative positive change. If Ghandi were a statistician, he might have talked about shifting or weighting the mean, if he were a talk show host, he might have talked about seeding the audience, but since he was an agent of transformative change, he talked about changing ourselves in order to change the world.

Hasdai Westbrook, our editor extraordinaire and Change-Monger-in-Chief, regularly reminds me to consider the social innovation components of the various issues that I address in my columns, and often this is a challenge for me when writing about burgeoning pandemics in Saudi Arabia. Today, however, I am struck how the health of the city is affected by all of its residents and their activities. Planting community gardens and socially responsible investment are both contributers to the same vision, and are relevant to the health of the greater community.

Barton, H.; Grant, M., 2006. A health map for the local human habitat. The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health

My beat is Public Health, with local and global implications. At its core, Public Health is concerned with trends and interventions at the population level. While those in the research and analysis end of the field must be driven by process and procedure, those engaging in interventions must be driven by vision.

No public health intervention is undertaken without a vision of a better future for the population, but I believe that the definition of health intervention should be broadened considerably. From urban farms to the Mayor’s public safety initiatives to public art projects, there are a great number of activities taking place in Baltimore (and around the world) that directly and substantially impact population health. These activities impact the education, nutrition, economics, safety, and appearance of our neighborhoods, which can have a profound impact by shifting the mean toward a healthier city and and a healthier world.

Next time, The Gluten Wars, A Health-Conscious Society Loses Its Mind

May 12

Embracing the Noise

By Lindsey Davis | The Good Plan | One Comment

At noon on Saturday I sat in a white rocking chair on a front porch. A springer spaniel sat at my feet, a strawberry beer in my hand. I heard birds. I was confused.

“So wait, this is considered the City? We’re within the city limits?”

A fellow planner and I were in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I was trying to wrap my head around a place with front yards, back yards, and heavy tree canopy. It didn’t seem right to equate that landscape with the term “city.” I had landed the night before and promptly dozed off in a taxicab. it took me several minutes to figure out what was different about where I was, as we zipped through the wide roads under the night sky. It wasn’t the warmth I’d been seeking for months, and at first I figured it was the absence of sirens and police helicopters I’ve sadly become so attuned to living in Baltimore City. Halfway through the taxi ride, I realized the difference was an overall silence. I was surrounded by skyscrapers in the central business district at 9pm on a Friday night, and there weren’t any people anywhere.

I had too many things to write about this week — dangerous playgrounds, airports, my newly formed place-making theory which I’m dying to put in front of an intelligent audience. But as I drove along the empty streets of a 2.96 million person metropolitan area, I realized I needed to write about people — the ones I love to hate, the ones in my way, who talk too loud and hang out too late. When I step back, I realize these people are part of the Baltimore urban fabric.

My first conscious encounter with the urban tradeoff happened on the island of O’ahu, Hawaii, where the Aloha spirit became a bit too much to bear. The rainbows which constantly littered the paradisaical sky became commonplace, and after months of living on the island I found I hardly noticed colors amongst the clouds. I missed thunder and lightening, and realized if I lived in Hawaii, I would be sacrificing those beautiful summer storms for good. Would the tradeoff be worth it? Could I trade in thunderstorms for rainbows? A similar thought came to me during that Carolina cab ride: would I give up the noise of the city for a place that goes to sleep at sundown?

There are people I know, and who you might know too — the more infamous loiterers of Baltimore who I’ve found myself apologizing for. The woman who ran across Boston Street on a whim with her shopping cart, screaming obscenities as you tried to screech your 40mph traveling car to a halt. The kids who hang out in the alleyway behind my house and talk too loud and too late, my neighbors who sit on their stoops and the kids who climb Clinton Street trees and the late-night Patterson Park walkers. Would my life be emptier without these people? If they disappeared from the streets for good would I be satisfied with the silence?

Instead of front porches, Baltimore has stoops. A little piece of earth we can safely call our own. These stoops aren’t just decorative, they foster neighborhood involvement and the built-in abilities for us to know our neighbors and keep an eye on our street. For those few hours of rest, we can survey our surroundings from a street level, rather than separated from everyone else on a back porch. Stoops have become engrained in our culture, from specialty-marketed cleaning products for stoop cleaning and inspiration for storytelling.

If you drive through the city at 9pm on a Friday night, you’ll see people out and about — and those who aren’t necessarily going anywhere, but who have simply found a great spot to sit, and look at everyone else. This is the beauty of more and more people living downtown — the fact that as much as I miss nature, if I’m going to live in a city, I want it to be vibrant.

There’s something wonderful about being able to sit at the street level. We fight for parks and public spaces, as well we should, but let’s not forget our own opportunities to populate the little bit of marble and outdoor real estate we call home.

IMAGE CREDIT. Apartment Therapy.

Apr 01

Beyond the Band Aid

By Lindsey Davis | The Good Plan | No Comments

Become Obsolete. In the fall of 2011 I heard Jay Parkinson of Hello Health speak at TedXMidAtlantic on the integration of technology and healthcare access. The entire talk was engaging, but those two words struck me: “become obsolete.”

That’s it. Engage in a way so that you aren’t needed anymore. Heal the source of the problem instead of sticking a band-aid on the wound. The difficult part is that our society often caters to the band aid approach. For if we’re no longer needed, how will we pay the rent? It’s a challenge we need the courage to tackle.

The key to becoming obsolete is identifying the problem, and then identifying its root. In the field of community development, problem identification often revolves around need, which in turn breaks down to perceived versus actual need. The difference between these needs is crucial to placemaking and community development.

Perhaps as an outsider, you’re frustrated by the lack of street signs and navigation in an area. You perceive the need as signage, to facilitate clear routes and to make the place easier for outsiders to visit. The residents, however, do not drive. They don’t need street signs — they know where they’re going and how to get from point A to B on foot or via public transit. What they need, in fact, are streetscapes that make walking safer and sheltered bus stops. The actual need is to make their pedestrian and public transit-heavy way of life safer and more convenient. This actual need is the solution to a sustainable and strong neighborhood, rather than a quick fix to attract the occasional passer-by.

I think of perceived and actual need in direct relation to the latest spike in Baltimore’s crime statistics. Every morning I check my twitter feed and my heart breaks a little bit. Today it was the recap of three overnight shootings. The morning updates of death and violence continue to pop up, and can be explained as simply as, something, somewhere, is broken. From what I understand, police are all over the western district right now, as their presence is expected to deter crime from taking place. While I have only headlines and crime maps to inform me of these trends in violence, my assumption is that their presence isn’t working. If it were, my Twitter feed would be silent. Their presence would, in fact, become obsolete. Maybe the perceived need for a police presence isn’t meeting the actual need, which may be something else entirley.

In graduate school I learned of the concept of infinite regress — the idea that we can always blame one more person for a perceived fault. For example, perhaps it’s not you fault there’s a hole in your shirt, it’s probably the fault of the manufacturer for using low grade fabric. Or maybe it’s the fault of the workers who produce the shirt for the manufacturer. Or it’s the fault of the boss who directs the workers who… you catch my drift. We have an innate need to point a figure and direct blame — primarily, I would assume, because we feel a need to fix the broken piece. In all of our professions, our job is to identify the problem so we can fix it. We exist, I would hope, to make things better.

This past week at Ignite Baltimore, a city employee stood up and expressed the desire to be innovative, but the inability to do so. Again, I was crushed. The constraints institutions put on employees to maintain the status quo doesn’t foster the development of new ideas or the ability to solve old problems. One of my favorite stories came out of Victoria, British Columbia two years ago, when officers began to carry lollipops in order to placate rowdy bar-goers or loiterers. Not only is it difficult to yell with a lollipop in your mouth, but fewer words led to fewer altercations, the sugar was calming, and the ‘pacifier effect’ seemed to steady those who may have been riled up.

We need the infrastructure to try new things and the courage to not be needed anymore. Doing more of the same, like increasing police presence, won’t ever be a long-term solution to crime. If you always do what you always do, you’ll always get what you’ve always got, and what we’ve currently got is far from optimal.

IMAGE CREDIT. Hasdai Westbrook