Meeting with City Councillor, Mike Layton

Here is a quick update on the development of collaborative villages.  Hope you find it inspiring for what you are up to in your neighbourhood.  Let me know if you and your neighbourhood would like to collaborate with the Bathurst and Bloor area of Toronto.

Councillor Mike Layton and I met January 6, 2014, regarding the Markham Street MuSE for living in a more creative Toronto.  It is also a community-led innovation and social response to today’s creative and learning economies.  We noted the fact that the Canadian economy is now less reliant on manufacturing, and that the City of Toronto wants to encourage citizen's to be leaders in today’s economies.

Mutual Support Enterprises are proactive member-owned associations that develop and advance a neighbourhood vision of urban living, or a ‘hyper-local’ vision for a street.  A MuSE is an association and hybrid of a social agency and a business.  It makes money to reinvest in social and economic development.

It encourages fulfillment of each person’s preferred roles, values, and vision for their life.  As member-owners we become more of who we are, both individually and collectively.  We develop further understanding, creativity, and increased capacity for health, vitality and well-being.

A MuSE is also uniquely positioned to be first-in-the-marketplace for helping corporations look at the wholeness in situations so as to benefit their return on investment.

There is an opportunity for the City of Toronto to supply arts groups with reusable material such as wood, metal, ceramics, fabric, etc., that would otherwise be sold or put in landfill.  The councillor is currently looking at options, say, when contracts with existing service suppliers are up for renewal.
We live in an urban forest.  Neighbours could use felled local trees to make structures, such as gazebos and arbors, that could be sold for beautification of local gardens and parks.  This kind of logging would be more enterprising and locally advantageous compared to the noisy practice of reducing trees to wood chips.

The future of society depends to great extent on encouraging our entrepreneurs.  We had a conversation about establishing creative economy hubs, and the need for neighbours to support entrepreneurial start-ups.  Practices of supplying office space and services to entrepreneurs that support neighbourhoods (‘social innovators’) remain part of the solution.

The councillor is a board member of Artscape YOUNGplace which is an example of a new, multi-tenant arts & cultural centre in the ward – at 180 Shaw Street, just west of Trinity-Bellwoods park.

We also touched on how Waterfront renewal as an opportunity to demonstrate the advancement of larger scale creative and learning economy hubs.  Exhibition Place has always tried to showcase innovations, such as wind turbine technology.  Councillor Layton pointed out how governments are now limited in what they can responsibly invest in, in terms of supplying basic services such as sewage and drinking water, when there is no immediate return on taxpayer investment.

We discussed the possibility of making Waterfront development ‘more organic’, more responsive to community needs, more economically sustainable, and less reliant on investment through financial institutions.

China is building 1,000 new universities over ten years (source: Roger Martin, past dean of the Rotman School of Management, U of Toronto,) as a strategy for adapting to the learning economy.  However, ‘developed countries’ in North America and Europe are making little or no investment in new learning institutions.

This led to a discussion of our proposal for neighbourhood campuses and the possibility of using underutilized local spaces.  Ideas for gathering and streamlining existing learning opportunities into curriculum streams that develop new skill-sets necessary for today’s economies could have been discussed further.  However, we had talked for over an hour and it was time to adjourn.

Our appreciation goes to the councillor and his staff for their kind cooperation.

Andrew Owens.

Have you Organized as a Collaborative Village yet?

Today I attended the first in a new round of meetings about noise in our neighbourhood.  We live in a relatively quiet residential neighbourhood and found it alarming that an office space leasing business that encourages collaborations among companies with a 'social mission' would be so noisy.  Everything looked good when we heard that they were all about turning everyday challenges into opportunities to improve our communities and our planet.

However, business is business, and no doubt part of the plan was making money by renting out the main floor for parties.  Hey why not loud parties, as they can be more fun?  And what if these go on until 2 a.m.?  What about cars parked in the lane-way in-front of neighbour's garage doors?

Special occasion permits and liquor licenses are secured from the City.  And it's 'Party on!' with scant regard for people trying to get some shut eye.  It's all about that bottom line, improving communities, staying alive, and being socially innovative.   

At today's meeting we recognized this was no-longer about explaining our concerns to the new business in our midst.  This was going to be about ensuring they were denied permits.  We simply want to shut those noisy parties down.

It was not until schmoozing around the cheese platters after the meeting that I realized we could have been creative.   

Doh!  We could have been proactive!  

Why be constantly reactive, on the defensive or offensive for whenever a new crisis arises?  In addition to gearing up for another confrontation, we could also be looking to partner with this, and other businesses in the neighbourhood.

They need us on their side.  And in a transition to a creative economy, maybe we need them to be on our side too.  Maybe not the retirees in the group, but the kids, youth and self-employed people could benefit from help in becoming arts-based professionals.  (See previous blog for more on how economies evolve.)

  

The challenge for a group of neighbours to partner with businesses is that we need a creative and aspirational vision for the area.  (What could the neighbourhood be like with more beauty, enrichment and convenience at our doorsteps?  How do we attract more grace into our lives?)

Out of the vision comes a mission, or how to we make the vision real.  Tumbling out of the mission will come a series of major objectives, or the main aspects of how we are going to be pro-active in helping ourselves and others.

Businesses are clear on what they are working to achieve.  Ask the company chiefs what their objectives are and they will have an up-to-date list of reasons why all their people came together and get paid each month. 

So in preparing to partner, we address the challenges of coming up with a neighbourhood vision.  We would not be the first neighbourhood around here to do such a thing.  In fact you could say we have been lagging behind.  See http://glenmurray.onmpp.ca/pages.aspx?id=community_planning 

A new way to get things done

Either before or after our little rumble with the new business in the area, I will propose a Collaborative Village model of organizing.  This generates income and support for people willing to contribute to improving society.  In fact, I'm blogging right now, so why don't I suggest it here, and email a few of the neighbours?

A Collaborative Village secures suitable, under-utilized space for various aspects of a neighbourhood campus.  This is for education that prepares youth and entrepreneurs for the transition to a creative economy.  Studies will be within areas like creativity, community, compassion, and entrepreneurship.

And there's a big role for semi-retired elders to play.  They can help younger people start initiatives, becoming more practical and realistic.  And neighbourhood elders stand to learn a lot from today's youth.

A Collaborative Village looks at local TV and internet sites for production and support for our neighbourhood campus.  Let's face it.  The various levels of government are not going to be building large numbers of new universities and colleges.  So we can guarantee that people who need the necessary re-education won't get it unless the whole neighbouhood understands how it stands to benefit from working together.

A Collaborative Village sets up local collaborative hubs for self-employed people who can benefit from working together.  And we all need a break from all this commuting that chokes our lungs and stresses the ecology.

So who wants to coordinate a village?  

Self-employed people who are coaches, workshop facilitators, mediators, healing professionals, counselors and agents are always looking for new clients.  And nothing beats 'word-of-mouth' referrals! 

New and affordable opportunities for promoting services provide these kinds of entrepreneurs with real and immediate benefits.  I know I would like a neighbourhood rooting for me because of doing good work for the local community.  Why wouldn't others? 

Is coordinating a village possible?

It was not possible to have all this extra enrichment of our lives before the internet.  There were few options in terms of post-secondary education but to build a new campus.

People needed to publish expensive text books, because we had no way to learn and bring our knowledge together like we can today, using a wiki.  We had no opportunities to publish materials on-line as a neighbourhood - say on websites or blogs.

We didn't have on-line tools for business collaborations which allowed for our individual principles and values, until www.bettermeans.org was freely available to everyone.  And there were few options for local film and TV production and distribution, that is, before phones were manufactured with built-in cameras, and www.YouTube.com came along.

Now, with the Internet and on-line tools, coordination of a collaborative village has become very do-able.

What other models are there to consider?

The business investment area (BIA) model started on Bloor West Village in Toronto and is now in use in over 1,000 cities internationally.  However, people who run BIA's don't always live in the area, and often don't care what goes on in an area after their businesses close for the evening.

A BIA will react if something impacts their business, but they won't necessarily be proactive in terms of enriching the non-commercial areas of a neighbourhood, say residential streets, or other streets off the main street.  

You can also consider a resident's association model, where there is great socializing and occasional coming together around problems and opportunities. But nothing that we could consider as a response to the effects of globalization, and the subsequent economic transition we are going through.  It just seems to me that extreme change on the planet demands more than - the same ol', same ol'.

The residents` association in our area is wonderful, highly effective, and we have an innovative and fully engaged city councillor.  This may not be the case in your area.  Note that education and coordination for working a post-industrial economy is not part of their mission.

Also consider a ‘Friends of the Area’ model of volunteering, open to anyone.  You see this around parks or lane-ways that a city can no longer afford to maintain.  It can be fun in the short-term but it won't continue to bring people together unless there's some financial benefit.

As we move beyond some of the social conditioning on which we were raised, we see how we're all inherently creative.

There are many options that we can research, share and explore.  This is how people have adapted and moved forward throughout history.