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 customersto 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. 

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.

Finding Your Community Around the World

This next success story is about Jessica.

In January, Jessica posted an ask on  Switchboard: “Meet me at airport/restaurant & I buy you breakfast in London, Sat. Feb 2.”

Jessica says, “I posted an ask on Switchboard for my fantasy, someone to meet me at the airport really early, have me buy them breakfast, and then take me to my hotel. I knew it was a long shot but I figured, don’t ask, don’t get.”

One of Switchboard’s many mottos is: “Ask and Ye Shall Receive.” Jessica asked, and she did receive. After posting on Reed Switchboard, she connected with Michael ‘07 and Susan ‘07 and got her wish.

“Michael met me at my train station, took me on a cool little tour, and then the three of us had a very nice dinner at Duke of Cambridge. They even waited an hour with me at the bar for my cab as the trains had stopped running.”

“I would absolutely recommend Switchboard to other Reedies and will probably use it again,” says Jessica. “One of the nice things about Reedies is that if you’re traveling somewhere where you don’t know anyone, you can usually find a Reedie willing to entertain you.”

Jessica and Michael and Susan graduated 14 years apart. They all went to Reed, but were separated by time. Five thousand miles away from their alma mater, Switchboard brought them together.