Have you ever prayed this : "Our Father who is in Heaven, Holy be your name. Your Kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven....." STOP there for a second. Why don't you join God in being the answer to that prayer as a new church, a new church leader, and/or a disciple of Christ. What could you do to make your neighborhood a better place - a community place where people liked to be with one another?
In the article entitled, How to Be a Citizen Placemaker: Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper, the author suggest citizens re-engage their communities to make them better places. Here are some highlights from the article:
"When you think about making your neighborhood a better place, think Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper (LQC). In public space design, the LQC strategy is framed as a way for communities to experiment with a place and learn how people want to use it before making more permanent changes. That experimental attitude can be adopted by anyone. Just ask yourself: what’s one thing I already enjoy doing that I could bring out into the public realm?"
“If you don’t spend at least some time thinking about the state of mind of Placemaking—every decision, behavior, everything that we do as residents in our place every day—on top of the infrastructure that’s provided by the place itself, then you miss a really important part of the conversation, where everybody gets to have some of the responsibility.”
"If you are a change-oriented person, we need you to lead. Whether you want to move your office outside, organize a citywide cooking festival, or start small by making a concerted effort to engage directly with your neighbors every day, know that your own actions are an essential component of your neighborhood’s sense of place, by virtue of the fact that you live there."
“We need professionals to think about themselves not narrowly disciplinary professionals, whose work is to simply solve a narrow disciplinary problem, but as citizen professionals working to contribute to the civic health and well-being of the community.”
"Team Better Block co-founder Andrew Howard explained how his own LQC street transformations in cities around the US have caused his understanding of how people engage with places to evolve. “As a planner,” he explained, “I always thought that, if I made the best plan, that would attract the right people to come from somewhere else and make that plan happen. What I’ve realized through Better Block is that every community already has everybody they need. They just need to activate the talented people who are already there, and shove them into one place at one time, and that place can become better really quickly.”
Read the entire article at this link....
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