A Season of Successes

'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:

• Kasandra’s loved one is hit by a car and she comes to the Wheelwomen Switchboard for care package suggestions. Not only does she get lots of helpful recommendations but Melinda, who lives nearby, offers to come by and help out.

• Peat generously offers to meet for coffee or lunch to help start up folks on the PDX Startups Switchboard. His post yields not one, but five successes!

• Joe asks for a connection to someone at the Lego Foundation on the Reed College Switchboard. Greg puts him in touch with PhD student who puts him in touch with the director of that group who puts him in touch with the Director of Research and Learning at the LEGO Foundation, who not only gives him an informational interview, but encourages him to apply for a position.

• Simone asks for advice about going to law school on the Oberlin Switchboard and receives responses from 16 different people across four decades of alumni! It’s such a wonderful success that it gets its own blog post on the Oberlin Webteam blog.

• Tyler posts an offer for whole or half pigs from his small farm on the Meat Collectives Switchboard. Eric purchases a half pig and returns to share a raving review. Tyler returns himself to tell us that, thanks to Switchboard, he sold out of pork for the year!

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.

Wanted: A house

This week we had one of the most delightful posts I’d like to share. It was an ask for a house.

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Some background.

Elly was interviewing DeMarcus Preston about a bike ride that he organized against gang violence. Here’s a photo: 

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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.

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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…

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…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. 

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Here’s her comment:

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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.

If you didn't grow up in a Sardinian mountain village you have to make your own

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…

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And here’s how it all resolved:

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Melinda, a total stranger until this “village” was created, offers to lend a hand:

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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. 

A pig, a photo, grapes, and our life's purpose

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.