on the way to fetch shaun
I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which essentially says that success is the product of hard work (100,000+ hours of practise) and having the social connections to opportunities.
There was a chapter on why kids in low-income families don't do well. Its not because they are stupid, but because they are not in the environment of education. That got me thinking, don't we have institutions that are suppose to serve this need?
I thought about our community centres and what they are suppose to do. But I realised that they are quite static institutions, serving as platforms for service providers, and not to actively reach out to the community per se.
So that got me thinking. Its not that we need community centres, its that we need community ENGAGEMENT centres. We need places and buildings to engage the community outside, serving the needs of the community. What do people in the community need? The kids, especially, need a place to LEARN, but also someplace where they can hang out too.
I am thinking along the lines of Dave Egger's Once Upon a School concept. I am thinking of a place, where you put nice tables and chairs, study lamps, daylights, wifi, computers, books, and lots of books, and you have volunteer instructors to teach the kids stuff when you need. And then I thought, maybe to improve the stickiness of the place, have guitars, keyboards, drums, so that groups of kids can come and do jamming sessions with their friends, and then, why not have skate parks, dance parks, so that they will stay essentially in the same area and not hang out with potentially unsavoury company. Ask music, dance, other kinds of instructors to come help out on a pro bono basis. Same for any other kind of say, visual art. Impose restrictions that people can only do their own things after spending say, 2 hours mugging.
Then invite people in the community to participate with the maintenance or in the foods, maybe selling small widgets. Better yet, let the community decide in how this community engagement centre might work. Make the building energy positive, maybe wait till solar power becomes damn cheap, have lush gardens to filter rainwater and contribute to the local community, then sell whatever excess energy and water to the local community.
Business model might come from the usage of the jamming facilities, or from the proceeds of whatever community entrepreneurial venture at the centre. Might even come from sales of excess energy or water from the building itself.
I know this is like a castle in the sky, but wth. The supposedly lower-hanging fruit would be to retrofit the existing community centres with the said facilities.
Its really a mash-up of two TED ideas, Dave Egger's Once Upon a School, and this Bill Stricklands guy.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/
http://www.ted.com/index.php/
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