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.