Hey! Martha here. I’m jumping in this week with a story of my own—my story at Switchboard—which began with opportunity literally knocking on my door.
It all started on a chilly night in the fall of my freshman year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. I was hanging out in my dorm room with some friends on a Friday night, talking about a paper we had to write about Aeschylus that was due the next day, when I got a knock at my door.
'Tis the season for reflecting on what makes you grateful. Luckily, gratitude is at the root of what we do at Switchboard.
It’s fundamental to our company culture. It’s built into the structure of the space itself. And it’s baked into my job as community manager. I spend a good part of every day watching helpful, generous people be good to one another and finding ways to say thank you. I can’t say it enough.
Over the course of the last year we’ve seen too many exciting things to share them all but we want to give you a taste of how much gratitude is going around on Switchboard these days.
These are some of our favorite success stories:
How’s that for sharing the love? For us, this is what it’s all about. We couldn’t be more grateful for all of the ways you warm our hearts.
This week we had one of the most delightful posts I’d like to share. It was an ask for a house.
Some background.
Elly was interviewing DeMarcus Preston about a bike ride that he organized against gang violence. Here’s a photo:
During the interview Elly discovered some unintended consequences of Portland’s gentrification (thanks, in some part, to the many tech jobs created in the city). “’As people get displaced from inner and North Portland, [the gangs] moving east,’ DeMarcus said. It used to be that everyone had their territories pretty well sorted out, but now it’s common to have people from three different gangs living in the same block and running into each other at the convenience store.” DeMarcus says the gang violence he’s seeing is as bad as it was in the 1980s.
Here’s the problem: “There is no safe house where people who want to leave their gang (apparently that’s a whole lot of people, some with regrets, others who were forced to join in the first place) can go to get on a new path.”
Clearly, what is needed is a house. “So, who’s in?,” writes Elly. “Got a house? Got money? Got part of the money? There are a lot of amazing things happening in Portland right now and the price of those things does not have to be violence. We can all succeed together.”
Now it happened that that day I had a meeting at City Hall with Jillian Detweiler, the policy director for Mayor Charlie Hales.
I showed Jillian the post. I’ll admit that it felt kind of Pollyanna-ish…to hope that a government official would care or take the time to respond. She read it over, paused, and said, “Well, you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.” And this, really, is the essence of Switchboard, and what Jillian pick up on immediately. It is impossible to know what is possible until you ask. Jillian then created an account…
…and forwarded Elly’s post to Antoinette Edwards, the Director of Youth Violence Prevention, and then took the time to comment and reply to Elly.
Here’s her comment:
And Elly’s response:
@marazepeda@MayorPDX jawdrop
— Elly Blue (@ellyblue)November 7, 2014
There was another response from Chris over at the Portland Development Commission.
Look: I know what you’re thinking. There are probably three ways this could go. Maybe, through some act of grace, charity, or bureaucratic wrangling, DeMarcus will get the house he dreams of to rehabilitate former gang members. Elly will report a success, and this post will embody what is possible when are vulnerable and courageous enough to ask for what we need and have our community respond. Perhaps it will be determined that there simply isn’t the capacity, or the necessary paperwork isn’t up to snuff, and it will die as so many things do, when minutiae overwhelm any possibility of the miraculous. Or maybe nothing will happen at all. Just another citizen with good intentions.
I don’t know what the outcome is, but I promise we’ll keep you updated. But DeMarcus telling Elly telling Jillian telling Antoinette, in under 24 hours, is, as far as I can tell, evidence that something on Switchboard is working. Quite simply: the connecting cables are in motion, and the right connections were made.
The other day I came on this NPR story, which led me to this book, The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter. This idea, that human contact powers the world, is nothing new to us here Switchboard HQ. I’d say 75% of the interactions facilitated on Switchboard happen in real life, from farmers finding customers to people meeting over coffee to talk about non-traditional paths to tech careers.
I’ve highlighted nearly the entire book, but I wanted to share this passage. Pinker writes: “This book has shown that intimate contact is a basic human need. Indeed, most of us not born in Sardinian mountain villages still hanker for the feeling of belonging…that these villages bestow.” She goes on to quote American historian Christopher Lasch who had this to say about the social contract in the ’90s, soon after the word “cyberspace” came on the scene.
"We wanted our children to grown up in a kind of extended family, or at least with an abundance of ‘significant others.’ A house full of people; a crowded table ranging across the generations; four-hand music at the piano; nonstop conversation and cooking; baseball games and swimming in the afternoon; long walks after dinner; a poker game or Diplomacy or charades in the evening, all these activities mixing adults and children—that was our idea of a well-ordered household and more specifically a well-ordered education…Home was not to be thought of as the nuclear family.”
We’ve seen at Switchboard that we cobble together these extended families with the people we trust. Over at the Switchboard for women cyclists Kassandra posted this ask for care package ideas after a member of her extended family was in a bike accident…
And here’s how it all resolved:
Melinda, a total stranger until this “village” was created, offers to lend a hand:
At Switchboard we’re interested in making it easier for these villages of significant others can gather online so we can reunite at the dinner table, the piano, or the bedside of a friend in need. The internet shouldn’t feel like home, but it should make home easier to find.
Hi there friends,
I had the most Switchboard-y weekend this week. Allow me to share? It’s kind of epic.
Did you know there is a Switchboard for Portland farmers to connect with customers wanting to buy locally raised sustainable meat? There is! The Portland Meat Collective Switchboard was started by Camas Davis, a force of nature.
Back in September, William posted an Ask for a Pig.
He was immediately contacted by farmers and ended up going with one he found from Payne Family Farms in Carlton, OR. And then William did what we hope every Asker will do on Switchboard: he posted a success:
These successes make us inexpressibly happy at Switchboard Headquarters. So happy, in fact, that I Tweeted about it:
In response, William invited me to the grand display of his success: a pig roast to celebrate his family’s housewarming (and, unofficially, 30th birthday). How could I refuse?
I was greeted by their cat, Dante. This happened to be the last sunny day in Portland. Dante found a good way to spend it:
I met Wiliam’s dad, Daniel, who has roasted about a dozen pigs. He started out by doing pig roasts for his church and his town’s non-profits.
I asked Daniel why pig roasts build community so well. “People are fascinated,” he said. “It gets back to something pretty basic. It’s primal.” This is how we’ve been gathering together for years. Around a fire, with an animal, eating with our hands. All that’s changed is that we use rubber gloves and mops a basters.
The six hours of slow roasting paid off. It was delicious.
Also: there was homemade pie—blueberry, pumpkin, and apple—courtesy of Rosanna.
It’s a glorious fall day, I’m milling around with a multigenerational bunch of friends and neighbors and who do I run into but Ethan Rafal.
Backstory: one of the reasons we started Switchboard at Reed was very much because, if you can believe it, there was no place for students and alumni to post about their Kickstarter campaigns and ask for the community’s support. One of the earliest such campaigns was Ethan’s 2012 photography project documenting post 9/11 war and homeland decay called Shock and Awe (book out this fall!). This was that post, one of the first Kickstarter Asks.
We pledged to fund every Kickstarter campaign. A few months after it ended I got this photo in the mail (of Ethan’s grandmother) which now hangs in my office. I’d never met Ethan, but seeing how Switchboard could be used to support a community I care about, manifest in this photo, was a daily inspiration.
And then there he was, in William’s back yard in his snazzy pink converse. Both of our eyes lit up. “I know you!” And that’s what it felt like. I knew him, despite never meeting him in person. He’s been one of our best supporters on Switchboard, always reaching out to Reedies in the Bay asking for housing or opportunities in the arts.
It happened that earlier this week there was this other ridiculously great post on Reed Switchboard from a faculty member, Sarah. She had a bumper crop of grapes in her back yard and posted this Offer for Grapes. And conveniently, she lived not far from the pig roast.
I asked Ethan and a few other folks if they wanted to go on an adventure and off we went. Sarah was out of town but here was her big-hearted text. Imagine a world where people open up their back yards to one another to share fruit (as I learned, that already happens in Portland, naturally):
We resorted to crazy tactics to get at the bounty:
I brought my portion of grapes into work. And then I logged a success (as did Martha, from our team):
The sun was setting, we were covered in concord grape juice in clothes saturated with meat smoke and remnants of whipped cream on our chins. It was Dionysian.
Ethan gave me $2.50 for bus fare and that was the only time money changed hands that day.
Last week I spoke at a panel on the sharing economy. I was on stage with with an employee of AirBnB. I felt a bit out of place. Long before AirBnB there were independent bed and breakfasts across the country. My mom ran one out of my childhood home. And although we’d receive notes in the guest book along the lines of, “Thank you for sharing your home,” for my mom it was, “Thank you for sharing your money. We we can now pay our mortgage.” She never continued a relationship with a single guest.
It seems there are transactional economies with monetary exchange, and there’s sharing (full stop), an economy of gift giving built from the simple, primal, inexhaustible, currency-free activities of communities giving, receiving, and reciprocating. In my mind, there is a gulf that separates the two. It perplexes me that we lack the discernment to recognize the difference. As Lewis Hyde put it, “It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establish a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection…a gift makes a connection.”
We at Switchboard are often asked what our product “does.” “What’s the value proposition? What would people have to share? How is this different from a Facebook group?” This question is one of the hardest to answer. What it “does” is a reflection of the hearts of the people who use it, and the connections they make there. A web is formed from Camas to William to the Payne family to Rosanna to Daniel to Dante to Ethan to Ethan’s grandmother to Sarah to my fellow grape pickers to Martha to me. I’m not Facebook friends with a single one of these people, nor have I the desire to be. These types of webs aren’t built or maintained there. This web is different. It was built by kindness, generosity, and grace, and constructed within the practically invisible doorframe of Switchboard. The value proposition of this doorframe is our belief that sharing and receiving these necessary gifts is our reason for being alive.
What a trip this has been! In just four short weeks, we visited Chicago, Oberlin, and New York City; threw four different parties; met individually with close to 20 people; and talked with more than a hundred. We met current students, recent grads, older alumni, wheelwomen, Switchboard operators, school administrators, and community managers. We made old friends and new ones. Veteran Switchboarders and Switchboarders-to-be hosted us, fed us, and shared their stories.
In one month, across the span of the midwest and northeast, we met with these hundred or so users, supporters, and friends—members of the Switchboard family. Whenever you step out of your office and into your community, when you open your ears to your users and build on your relationships with friends and customers, you are bound to learn something. It turns out you learn a lot, perhaps more than you know at the time. We wanted to share a few of our favorite lessons with all of you.
We learned that Switchboard is something people can believe in. It isn’t every day that you ask your users to let you buy them coffee and they come knocking down your door with their success stories, their feedback, and their overwhelming support. More than a few people who told us that they “loved Switchboard and would be happy to do whatever they can to help.” It might be because, as one user said “It’s not always about achieving the task [of your ask or offer] but about connecting with people.” Or it could be because Switchboard, as one young alumni put it, “helped [them] be less afraid about life.” But for all of the praise our users had for us, we can return it twicefold. We are so lucky to be able to say that our users are some of the most thoughtful, brave, generous and optimistic people we know. Across the board, the Switchboard family is a family of doers, builders, and helpers—every single one of them.
Our customers have told us that Switchboard is special because it can be integrated into almost everything they do. They love it because Switchboard lets their community define success for themselves. And they embrace Switchboard because they understand that most good things emerge from strong relationships. Whether these are the relationships between students and professors, older alumni and recent grads, peers sharing with peers, or between people anywhere that share your passions and experiences, these relationships are what build communities. We are immensely grateful to have found partners in academic administrators and in individual community leaders who completely believe in what we do.
From our mentors we have learned that there will never be a substitute for the human touch. In spite of membership numbers in the millions, companies like Etsy, Kickstarter, and Meetup continue to support their users with dedicated community managers every day. After talking with our friends, we can confirm that maintaining a high quality of community involves talking directly with people, listening to what they need, and showing appreciation for their contributions. At Switchboard we are human first. It’s in our writing, it’s in our customer support, it’s in the way we appreciate our users, and it’s in the standards of care and connection we set for all of our communities. And we have yet to be let down. Care begets care. Generosity leads to generosity. Be more human than company, and you won’t have a user-base, but a family.
If every Switchboard is greater than the sum of its parts, then Switchboard the company, the dream, is greater than the sum of each of our individual communities. We are nothing but for you. Here at HQ we are trying to build a house, and you have made it a home. And what a bustling and productive home it is! The Switchboard Hearts tour may have come to an end, but you fill our hearts constantly. The parties are over, but we want to carry the spirit of celebration and of appreciation through every year. If you are in Portland, I invite you to reach out and join me for a cup of coffee. Send us your thoughts, your hopes. Send us a postcard, a love letter, or list of ways we can improve (you can reach us here). A home is a place with an open door. We’d love it if you stopped in to say hi!
