What would it take to create a widespread sense of urgency about solving Baltimore’s problems? I often feel that our region’s relative wealth allows some of us to be insulated from the pockets of poverty and instability that deeply affect too many of our fellow citizens. When critical public moments arise—such as the upcoming legislative session to address the state’s structural budget deficit—we fail to speak up, to take a stance about what needs should be met through public funds.
But what if we extract ourselves from the comforts and distractions of our everyday lives to assess what is unacceptable, what is fair, what is a smart investment in our future?
For example, how many of us would act differently if all our private schools, independent and parochial, suddenly had to close? If all our children were enrolled in the public school system, would we finally be motivated to find resources to attract the most talented principals and teacher? Would we insist upon after-school programs that are not only safe, nurturing and rigorous, but downright exciting? Would we make certain that young students not only enjoy updated books, computers, labs, and equipment but also the internships, cultural enrichment, life skills and leadership training that make for a successful transition to adulthood?
Or, to borrow an idea from New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg, what if we could no longer use cars to travel to jobs, doctors’ offices, and grocery stores, but suddenly had to depend on mass transit? Would we tolerate the inefficiency of a slow and incomplete transit network? Would we reconsider where we want to live and how we want to allocate public incentives for the location of jobs, stores and services? Would we be motivated to insist on better access to services if we walked through our neighborhoods on our way to work and home, seeing more clearly how others live and witnessing firsthand the effects of unequal health care, unemployment and abandoned housing?
Right now we have an unprecedented opportunity to speak up and make change. Our questioning and opinions matter now. As the State of Maryland faces its budget deficit, elected officials need to know what our priorities are and they need to hear from us directly. Maybe, if we allow our imaginations to take the lead, we can join together in a vision for what Baltimore can really become. Try it.
Would love to see the obesity problem, especially among our youth, considered a priority here.
I have often thought we ought to have a public transportation day or week and ask every manager working in the city to use public transportation instead of the car…once people understand the scope of the problem then we could build a constituency for change.
The Park Advocate Force is a virtual movement intended to mobilize Baltimore citizens to advocate for changing the conditions in our city parks.
The current, work-in-progress blog for this initiative may be found at parkadvocate.net.
The description of this initiative and some of its first and very recent posts will give the reader a sense of the underlying focus of the Park Advocate Force: maintenance of the parks, street trees and trails in Baltimore.
We kicked off our effort April 4, 2007 when we appeared at Taxpayers Night and asked the Mayor to sanction three initiatives: work on the Gwynns Falls Trail, commencement of the cleaning up of Druid Hill Park, and clearing the large backlog of 311 service requests for tree maintenance by homeowners and business across Baltimore.
Two of those initiatives are fully in play, that of the trail and the park. The tree issue is under consideration, but presents itself as a part of a larger tree problem(s) and will be attended to, we think, in the very near future.
Our movement is really about believing in an idea. That idea is that we can clean up, make green and safe the greatest urban park system in America.
As a former director of recreation and parks in Baltimore, I can assure the readers that this is indeed not only possible, but fairly within easy reach.
Fundamentally for this to happen the city only needs to realign existing resources within the Department of Recreation and Parks, and comprehensive and thorough maintenance programs can begin.
No new tax money is needed. And no money need be shifted from another city agency to the Department of Recreation and Parks for this substantial program to get underway.
To advocate for this change in general and thoughout the system, the Park Advocate Force will recommend the overall resource realignment strategy and fund applications.
To detail the work to be done, site by site, however, it is our intention to recruit and orient about 50 citizens who will inventory and prepare Maintenance Master Plans for city parks—along with the help of friends-of-parks groups and personnel of the Department of Recreation and Parks and other interested and vested groups—and then use parkadvocate.net to post their maintenance needs/inventory and use video and other contemporary technology to photo document the condition(s) of the site in question and post those visual findings on You Tube and eventually on our own blog, once it further transforms itself in time.
Thus, in effect, the CITIZENS will report the findings for maintenance requirements in our parks and visually document those findings as a way to benchmark a site and ready itself for the attention it will receive from a city that has the resources to make our parks the cleanest and greenest in America.
We invite all CITIZENS to visit our site parkadvocate.net, and join in, if you will, and volunteer to become a first advocate for a park in your area.
You will be oriented by me, personally.
This has been my profession for over 30 years and my biography and credential are on the site.
If we all step up and belong to this idea of maintaining our park resources and firmly demanding that our city government respond, we will have set an example of citizen interest, involvement and commitment, so far as I know, never otherwise attempted in the manner we are suggesting here.
You don’t have to join, pay dues, sit on a committee, or fund raise….you just belong to one simple idea—maintenance of our park resources and advocate for your park at the different levels and ways of your choice.
It is a movement.
Belong to the Force
Believe in the Idea
Thank you.
Chris T. Delaporte
Diana,
Kudos to you and your team at OSI for the Audacious Ideas blog.
I posted a link to the blog on my community listserv.
More importantly, I ask my neighbors these kinds of questions every month. While we do it on a micro-level, our block, it keeps us focused on success. We’re getting the kind of street we want. In other words, it works!
Catherine
Catherine Carey
3000 Block Chesterfield
Thank you, Diana and OSI.
Your posting asked me to spend a few minutes day dreaming today. May the blog continue to inspire this and other noble activities.
Julianne Franz
This is a very good idea. Will follow it closely. The City Housing Department is working on creating a land bank authority that would have broader legal powers to acquire and dispose of vacant land and buildings–an idea that could use some refinement and broad support.
Slipping our feet in the “shoes” of others is a great exercise in understanding the conditions that many of our neighbors are forced to engage. Once we begin to see first hand the disparities in health, education, recreation, opportunities, etc., we are likely to become more sensitive to the plight of others and eventually begin to ask the question of why this is allowed. If we follow this path and allow ourselves to be honest with ourselves we’ll find that at the core of the disparities you’re likely to find social injustice, “justifiable” oppression of others, and institutional racism alive and well.
I’m concerned enough about the brain drain leaving our workforce that our team compiled a competencies database so that talented boomers can groom and mentor the next workforce wave. Re-inventing ourselves over and over again is no longer efficient or effective. We hope to make a contribution to solving a problem rather than groaning about it.
Congrats on this encouraging idea! I have high hopes. That said, I’m a little jaded. In my experience, foundations need to think of themselves as seeking creative and big thinking, but are no more willing to leave their comfort zones than anybody else. Still, here’s an audacious idea:
Human behavior, the biggest factor in poverty, disease, substance abuse, global warming and other ills arises from a mixture of culture (social norms) and personal beliefs and attitudes. To treat the causes rather than the results of behavior, we need to address who we are——both our individual identities and those of our wider culture. Media does that. Highly compelling and artistically excellent media does it best. So, we should fund the socially oriented media arts at the level we now fund medical and criminal justice solutions to problems. Anything else would be ignoring the literature.
Opening eyes to problems that in one way or another affect us all, and then attempting to, and/or helping others to visualize resolutions to those problems, however audacious they may appear at first glance, are certainly good steps towards discovering what will be the best solutions. Thank you, and OSI for starting this new blog. It’ll surely help increase the pace and improve the direction of what must be evident to all but those locals with their heads in the darkest of regions; that much needed change in Baltimore.
Education….
Can you sit on a noisy bus and read a book?
Some people can. Some people can’t.
Imagine you were a school teacher, which child would you predict would learn more? The one that can sit on a noisy bus and read, or the one that can’t.
If we want our schools to be effective we must focus on teaching our students the art of sitting still, listening, and focusing.
It is not about more money for schools. There are schools around the world with less money that are being more successful.
The prerequisite to learning is sitting, listening, and focusing.
This is not about authoritative discipline. Sitting quietly, numbed out and blank is not a mind for learning. It ignores listening and focusing.
Before or concurrent to teaching the tree R’s, perhaps we should be teaching sitting still, listening attentively, and focusing intensively.
So, how can we teach that?
Okay, I get it. Still, I think if the site is to be effective we need to talk about barriers to innovation itself. It’s part of the problem. In a university research setting and in public policy discussions of all kinds, I hear people refer to others ideas as being “out there” “wacky” “not the way things work” and dismissed on that basis. We, as a people, choose our frames of thought–often connected to serve our identities. What organization doesn’t want to be thought of as innovative and open? How many are? This is human nature, but can’t be addressed until discussed in the open.
What a great venue for Baltimore citizens to share thoughts, visions, and ideals inside and outside of their network.
The more we are able to give voice to our aspirations and expectations for our neighborhoods, communities and this city, the better we are at ganering support amd concentrating attention on innovative ways to address the issues of our concern.
Audacious indeed. Obviously thought-provoking as well. Focusing on the two points raised by the initial post, two thoughts come immediately to mind:
1. Constitutionality – Utopian thinking aside, I suspect that there are more than few in the blogosphere that would argue for their individual freedom to choose where their children are educated or whether mass transit suits their personal travel needs.
2. Personal responsibility – Begins right in the home. The example that parents set has a huge cultural impact in that it establishes patterns their offspring’s behavior virtually from womb to tomb. Example: if you are disdainful of litter, establish discipline in your kids by rewarding them for cleaning up the mess they create at home before you set them loose in the world.
Expecting government and social institutions to do the job of instilling the high degree of morale and ethical standards required of a great society is a fool’s game we all need to disengage from.
There is one simple thing that really bothers me about the public school education in Baltimore City. Students without textbooks of their own!
It’s small, it’s totally fixable if we all banded together.
Students should have the advantadge to re-read the text, read ahead, or read chapters that aren’t even assigned…..I almost feel that this should be in inalienable right of the student, to have first-hand access to education materials at their disposal.
We are sending a very poor message to these students by not letting them have textbooks – things like “you don’t need them”, or “you are not worthy of your own books” are natural thoughts for them to have.
Let’s give kids the opportunity to empower their own learning!
It seems that this blog has struck a vein of good ideas. Keep sharing them! Clearly, with less than one-third of Baltimore City registered voters participating in the September 11 primary, many of our fellow citizens do not feel motivated to act. (And the low number of adults who are registered to vote is another big issue.) No one responds to a harangue, but I am hoping that a combination of compelling ideas and a steady expression of good will and concern for each other will prompt many more of us to be optimists about the future and believe that change can take place IF we take part. Clearly, the status quo is damaging too many of our fellow neighbors–and the region as a whole–to accept it passively.
Response to Paul Robinson:
RE: Personal Responsibility
Your thoughts lead to an initially compelling argument. However, it fails to give credit to the vast number of social changes that have occurred as a result of public actions that caused a shift in the scope of the conversation. For instance… anti-smoking campaign, wearing seat belts, drunk driving, speed limit laws, the “destruction” of Jim Crow laws, etc…
I’m more than willing to offer that private actions work more efficiently and effectively on small scale projects. But, for major issues (urban education, health care failures, and others), private actions fail just as equally as do public initiatives.
We cannot give up on the problems in society by pushing blame on personal responsibility. Personal responsibility probably contributes a HUGE part to the issues facing our society, but, and I ask not in jest, so what? There’s a failure. We get it. But, we can’t stop there. That needs to be the beginning of the conversation not the end. We can’t just blame everything on personal responsibility and give up. We have to say, so what! We have to say, yes there’s the failure, but we (collectively) can do something about it. Just a thought.
EDUCATION
Oprah says kids in the states want money for iPods and cell phones.
Kids in Africa want money for school uniforms.
Why are we doing wrong that our kids want ipods and cell phones more than they want an education? ???????????
How do we instill a HUNGER for LEARNING?
This blog is really getting somewhere!
- response to Tricia and Carole
A distrespect for school is as American as apple pie. Again, we have to be willing to look at our culture——at who we are and actually confront that in media-driven public discourse.
- response to the general sense that people are unwilling to get fired up about elections or the issues that face us.
Well established behavioral science tells us that people will only do something if they believe they are capable of succeeding: self-efficacy. There is no self-efficacy when it comes to sovling problems of crime and education. People must see an idea that think will work, and that they can accomplish before the flame will catch and spread.
Big Vision: Happiness
Imagine miles of roads opened to everyone and closed to motorized traffic, a festival atmosphere with thousands of casual and serious strollers, dog walkers, skateboarders, skaters, joggers, runners and cyclists of all incomes, ages and races, all having a great time together in and around our region from 7am to 2pm every single Sunday throughout the year. Imagine the new level of economic activity, excitement, shrinking waistlines, and discovery of our sometimes unknown or forgotten neighborhoods.
Ciclovia (bike-way in Spanish) now exists in several Latin American Cities. Bogotá Colombia has turned this dream into reality for the past 25 years with over 80 miles of city roads ‘opened’ for all people to use. In a city of 7 million, nearly a million people participate every single week.
(60% on bikes and 40% on foot)
Aerobics, Yoga and other exercise and educational classes are held along the way. The camaraderie of riding, running and walking with thousands of others, the cleaner air, peace and quiet and human energy has to be experienced to be fully appreciated. Folks look forward to each Sunday as a time to get out to exercise and spend quality time with family and friends without the fear and aggravation of motorized traffic.
Merchants and neighborhoods benefit from all the new retail activity, especially on a normally slow Sunday. Artists, actors, small venders, and sports shops all benefit as they have enthusiastic audiences passing by. We get a healthier population. Neighborhoods hold regular yard sales and fairs that highlight their best qualities. Families impatiently look forward to these quiet, safe, fun and simple Sundays spent walking and riding together. The stress and frustrations of the previous week dissolve away as you lose yourself in the wonderfully happy sea of our humanity. Baltimore has a unique opportunity in being the first city in the nation to create this physical internet…..
A lot of this ideas are really superfiscial and should be viewed with disdain…. The dialogue must be about the cry of the opressed, drug dealers, users,excons, cons and gangs are most gifted resources then this nation will continue to be crippled by turpitude….
I agree — imagine first commit second. We can achieve our goals when we quantify them (for example, every high school student in Baltimore City Public Schools, that chooses to, will be taught a skill and then paid a stipend to teach/share that skill with their younger peers.) All in favor say “aye” opposed “nay” if the ayes carry it — then it shall be. We have the resources to do it. We can no longer accept commitments from elected officials or ourselves as citizens to TRY to do what we all agree to — we must only accept commitments that show the way to put the idea into action.
President Kennedy didn’t try to put a man on the moon — he did it. So can we.
imagin — commit — do it.