Want to start your own project but need some inspiration? Our Learn from a Leader blog series is profiling past ioby Leaders who succeeded in bringing more fresh food, active transport, green spaces, and other healthy improvements to their neighborhoods. Read on, and imagine what you could do on your block!

About the project:

San Diegoan Avital Aboody rallied her neighbors to turn an underutilized parcel of land in a commercial district into a bright and beautiful community space for play, leisure, and gardening. The idea behind the H.A.C.E.R. Project Gilliam Family Community Gathering Place was to “touch on a lot of needs and desires we heard from the community,” Avital says.

She organized members of the Logan Heights neighborhood to design and build a vibrant, safe, and functional space where kids could play, people could enjoy lunch from local eateries, neighbors could watch outdoor performances on a small amphitheater and movies on a small screen, and everyone could learn about plants from a teaching garden. Sound good to you? Us, too! Read on to see how Avital made it all happen.

The steps:

1. Secure your space—and permission. If you have an underutilized site in mind for your community space, first make sure it’s in a highly-visible location. (Hidden lots in low-traffic areas aren’t the best candidates, since you want people to have easy access.) It’s also important that you pick a place where you’ve already established relationships: maybe you’ve led a trash pick-up or organized an event there in the past. You want to build trust with your community before asking for their support. Once you’ve checked those boxes, try to find out who owns the land. This can take some time, as you might have to sift through a lot of records, make a lot of phone calls, write a lot of letters, etc. Once you have a handle on it, reach out to the owner, explain your idea, and ask for permission to use their land for this community benefit. If they say yes, you’ll want to draft at least a simple lease (starting from a template is fine), and have an entity like your neighborhood association or a local nonprofit sign it as the space’s representative.
2. Tell people—and ask them. Get as many kinds of supporters together as you can: organize community meetings and pass out flyers to advertise them; send emails to local organizations informing them of your idea; contact teachers and ask if they want to give their students credit for volunteering… And ask everyone what they’d like to see in the space, as well as what skills they might be able to share, what materials they might be willing to donate, what days they could come volunteer, etc. (We met our key design and architecture partner, Space 4 Art, through this process!) We knew whatever we built needed to reflect what the people in our neighborhood wanted, so I kept a running list of everything they shouted out. Space 4 Art took those ideas and helped us narrow them down to what was most feasible, economical, and practical. You’ll also want to put together a dedicated group of organizers who will be with you from start to finish. In our case, that was the H.A.C.E.R. Project (Helping Achieve Community Empowerment and Revitalization) steering committee.
3. Then, show people. As we were holding meetings and gathering ideas, we also started organizing volunteer cleanups of the site’s weeds and trash, and put on a trial movie night with a $1 cover charge and food for sale by local vendors. These efforts made people aware that we were serious about our plans, already “plugged into” the space, and making progress toward our goals. We also set up a Facebook page and website to help keep people engaged as our plans (slowly) came together.
4. Divide and conquer (your budget). We raised about $65,000 total, through many different means, large and small. I pursued avenues like grants, reaching out to the city council and funders I already knew from my job, and funding competitions I found online. Meanwhile, the steering committee put together a list of the materials and supplies we needed and sent it around to their contacts; we got some good in-kind donations from that. The committee also came up with fun money-making ideas like placing “tip” jars—decorated by students—in local stores, which I collected once a week. All those quarters and dollar bills eventually added up to probably $1,000!
5. If you build it, they will come. Everything we did culminated in a highly-publicized “build week” where we tried to get the whole thing constructed in one week by hundreds of volunteers. To prepare, we identified the people with the best building skills and made them “captains” who could show up consistently and teach others. (When people don’t know how to do the tasks on offer, you get the problem of “idle hands.”) While in the end, the scope of the build was bigger than I imagined and took longer than a week to finish (more like a couple of months!), we did eventually get all the talent and elbow grease we needed to get it done. Then we celebrated with a gathering in our new space!

Time/timing:

Happily, there aren’t many seasonal issues to work around in San Diego (no snow, for example!). But we did want to get lots of student participation, and that’s easier to accomplish during the school year than in the summer, so originally we planned to build in June, then wound up pushing it to September.

It took about two years from the time I secured permission with the landowner to the time we were done with the build. One year might be enough for a less design-heavy project, but I wouldn’t budget any less than that since fundraising always takes time—grant cycles in particular.

Budget:

Once we had our design plans solidified, we drew up a detailed budget. Remember to include a line item for ongoing maintenance costs. You don’t want to build out a space and then not be able to keep it clean, beautiful, and safe!

When sending it to potential funders, we always made sure to illustrate how much of our budget we were already meeting with in-kind donations. This showed them we were being proactive and making use of every type of contribution we could.

Parting thoughts:

We met lots of people who don’t live near the space but who love to come out and support projects like this. That’s great, but it can become a sticky situation when residents see “outsiders” come in to help. Key to our success was engaging the people who live near the space in actually doing a lot of the work. We tried hard to make them feel it was really theirs: while our nonprofit partner was technically the leaseholder, we encouraged the community to organize their own programming; we made sure the gates were always unlocked during open hours; and we had our steering committee (which included some residents) take the lead on maintenance issues, instead of the nonprofit. You want your residents, more than anyone else, to be in charge. If they’re not involved, the space might go unused and become just another artifact of gentrification.

Additional resources:

– Our website: A good snapshot of the project.

– San Diego Foundation: We got a $30K-ish grant from them. Your community might be home to a similar funder.

About the author:

Avital Aboody is an organizer, social justice advocate, and grassroots community planner who has facilitated several participatory projects that create beautiful public spaces and build community wealth in historically looted neighborhoods.

Feeling inspired? Want to take action in YOUR neighborhood? If you have awesome ideas about how to make your town greener, safer, and more fun, let us help! Tell us your awesome idea right here. We’d love to help you get started today.

Fall is the time to get busy and start putting those summer dreams into action. We want to help you jumpstart your fall fundraising, so we’re waiving all fees if you launch a project with us from now until September 30!

That’s right, if you start your campaign in the next four   weeks, it’s TOTALLY FREE to use ioby’s platform and services. That means no platform fee, no donation processing fee, and no fee for fiscal sponsorship.

Because we’re focused on helping resident leaders make positive change in our neighborhoods, our regular fees are among the lowest of any crowdfunding platform, but we want to make it even easier to take that first step this fall.

You can make a huge impact on your community. Don’t wait to put that great idea into action. Tell us your idea today, and we’ll help you get started right away.

Marie-Antoinette Singleton of Lithonia, Georgia raised funds through ioby and Transit Center’s Trick Out My Trip campaign to improve a downtown bus stop. This improvement included a community and youth event, and helped draw attention to much-needed transit improvements in this bus-dependent community.

Have an idea to improve transit? We can help!
ioby.org/trip

Read more about the Trick Out My Trip campaign

ioby’s 2015 Giving Report is out!  Explore stories, stats, graphics and photos of a neighbor-led movement of positive change.

With your help,  ioby Leaders have now raised more than $2.2 Million in citizen philanthropy – money that  goes a long way toward making our neighborhoods safer, greener, more livable and more fun.

We are deeply saddened to learn of the recent passing of Yanet Rojas,  a passionate community garden leader and  beloved member of the Cypress Hills community. Yanet came to us in  2012 as the leader of the People’s Food Project in East New York, a grassroots  effort to transform a vacant lot into a  revolutionary hub of community building, urban agriculture and organic egg production.  The  ioby project she led, “Pollos del Pueblo,”  was just one small example of Yanet’s ability to unite her neighbors around important issues of open space access and community health.  For her work on this project, ioby  recognized  Yanet as  one of our “Heroes in Our Backyard”  in 2012.

Yanet was a true leader  and an incredible force for  good on a neighborhood scale.  In a  profile  on GrowNYC’s  blog, Yanet said,  “Gardening for me is a kind of philosophy, because you are not just growing plants, you are growing yourself – your humanity and your soul.”  While her great work and spirit of positive change lives on, she will be deeply missed.

You can watch a video piece about Yanet that we produced in 2012 here.

At ioby, we’ve been thinking a lot lately about what drives — and should drive — our work. As we gear   up to begin working in earnest in several new cities in the coming months, and  as  we prepare  to bring   on several new team members,  we wanted to go through the exercise of  listing explicitly the principles that   drive what we do each day.

The following is our collaboratively-created draft list of Principles and Actions.  Our hope is that by creating and listing our shared principles, and the actions they inspire, we’ll be better equipped to  handle the challenges of  growing on a national scale while remaining  true to our shared values of local, small-scale, neighbor-led change.

Do any of these resonate with you? Or maybe you have your own list? We’d love to hear your feedback.

Local is best.

Neighbors know best what their neighborhoods need. They are best equipped to innovate, organize, and make positive change, and are the best long-term stewards of solutions.

And so: We will support our citizen-leaders as experts, truly listen to them, offer guidance if they ask for it, and connect them with resources to help ensure their success.

Small is big.

Small, neighborhood-scale actions have far-reaching and long-lasting impact on places and on people’s lives. When taken together, these seemingly small projects make up a powerful movement of neighbor-led positive change that inspires hope and benefits us all.

And so: We will approach our work, and the work of our neighbors, as if no project is too small and no interaction too insignificant. Even as we work on the small scale, we will keep the big picture in mind.

Inclusivity is key.

Deeply rooted social and environmental problems such as systemic racism, wealth inequality, and climate change can only be addressed if all voices are heard and all ideas are considered. Including all voices in solution-building is particularly crucial when it comes to local decisions.

And so: We will seek out and elevate those whose voices have been historically repressed or underrepresented and actively encourage their ideas. We will remain conscious of the social and economic barriers to action that our neighbors and team members may face, and will offer our support in overcoming them. We will work toward inclusive solution-building by striving to dismantle inequity in all its forms. And we will build upon, rather than duplicate, the great work of others.

We’re whole people.

Each staff member, intern, volunteer, partner, and board member brings with them a rich variety of experiences, values, hopes, inspirations, stories, and challenges. By honoring that we are “whole people,” and by drawing on our individual qualities, we are better equipped to help others succeed.

And so:  We will honor the diversity within our team, and respect all individuals as equal members of a collegial community and as people with lives outside ioby. We will nurture our whole selves through pursuit of our own passions, knowledge sharing, fun, and active involvement in our communities.

Learn, experiment, share.

Successful and lasting change come when we embrace struggle and uncertainty as opportunities for creative experimentation and trust its potential for transformational impact.

And so: We invest in and support efforts to experiment, learn, and share solutions and insights through documentation, storytelling, data, feedback, and network building.

Imagine a world in which we all had more fun and less stuff. Imagine a world in which baby clothes, power tools, and all kinds of resources were shared, instead of used once and then left to collect dust, or worse, sent to the landfill. Imagine if we all fixed broken lamps, instead of buying new ones. Imagine if every town had a community garden whose fruits and veggies were free for all to take. Imagine if every town was full of community bee-keepers, skill-lenders, time-bankers.

Imagine if we were all conscious consumers.

That’s the world Anna Awimbo wants to live in. With 20 years of work experience identifying and developing effective alternative systems to address poverty, unemployment, and climate change, she’s steeped in the sharing culture mentality. In fact, in January of this year, she and a few friends and colleagues took a leap and founded a time bank in Silver Springs, Maryland – with no outside money. Already, the bank has close to 100 members. Check out Awimbo’s social media profile pic; it was taken by a photographer who happened to offer services via the time bank. Awimbo, who telecommutes, often doesn’t need the use of the car that sits in her family’s driveway; she offers rides to the airport or to run errands around town. And this summer, Awimbo’s 11-year-old, craft-oriented daughter “bought” an hour-long sewing-machine lesson with another time bank member, and was off and running. “It was a great way for her to use her summer,” says Awimbo. No camp signups needed. It was icing on the cake that Awimbo’s daughter learned a lot about volunteer work and local outreach in the process.

[Peace.Love.Swap & Play Community Center:  Grass Valley, CA]

Awimbo is also the director of the Collaborative Communities Program at The Center for a New American Dream, an organization that does amazing work to help people and communities shift towards sustainable consumption habits. Since 2013, New Dream has teamed up annually with ioby to select and support a cohort of New Dream community projects, via their Get2Gether Neighborhood Challenge; this year’s five winners are an awesome bunch, and they’re well into their fundraising. Awimbo is thrilled about each and every one of them. “I’m always telling people that this is the most exciting piece of the work that I do,” she says “I’m drawn to ordinary folks doing extraordinary things.”

We think you’ll love this year’s winners as much as she does. Some quick teasers for you:

CVille Repair café,  Charlottesville, VA

This one is as simple as it gets: a group of handy volunteers meet to hang out, build community, and fix whatever broken lamps, phones, thingamajigs and whatchamacallits their neighbors bring in that day. “The antidote to planned obsolescence,” they call it. It’s an idea that was born three years ago, in Amsterdam, and is taking hold in the States.

This repair café in particular is, as Awimbo points out, “a great example of how one project can grow and lead into another.” It sprang out of a Charlottesville time bank started two years ago. “It’s an offshoot of the time bank,” explains Awimbo. “They’re basically diversifying, and in the process, they’re able to market the work that they do and reach new people.” Super low-budge, super high-impact. Not to mention super fun.

One-BEEing, Hartford, CT

Two problems. One: Connecticut lost 40% of its bee hives last year. Two: lots of youth in Hartford need more to do during the summer months! Enter One-BEEing, a project that’s making beekeepers and sustainable-businesspeople out of Hartford youth. “He’s just really passionate about working with youth,” Awimbo says of the project leader, Olusanya, who works on a volunteer basis, “and about being a part of any initiative where he lives that will keep them engaged and give them new skills and keep them busy over the summertime.”

Capitol Hill Tool Library,  Seattle, WA

Did you know that the average power drill gets between 6 and 13 minutes of use in its entire lifetime? Kind of crazy for every household to have their own, right? “The Capitol Hill Tool Library team are folks who recognize this,” says Awimbo, ”and have jumped in and said ‘well, this is a great way to reduce overconsumption.’” They’re building a community-run tool library, where neighbors can go to check out that power drill for a day, or an ice-cream maker, or a table for 12 when the in-laws are in town.

 Permaculture Park,  Ithaca, NY

What if your local park was full of strawberries, herbs, and other goodies that were free for the taking? Public parks can be MORE than gorges, say the Ithaca Permaculture Park’s founders. They can be DELICIOUS, too! The project’s long-term goal is to fill the park, already well underway, with a dizzying variety of self-maintaining edible plants. In progress at the moment are five raised beds (to be filled with international veggies), an herb spiral, and interpretive signage designed to teach the public about permaculture, and to let grazers know what they’re tasting.

Peace.Love.Swap & Play Community Center:  Grass Valley, CA

A mom herself, Awimbo feels a strong connection with this project, a space where parents can gather, connect, take classes, and swap clothes, books, toys and tools.

“Child-rearing is one of the places where we see the majority of waste,” Awimbo explains, “in terms of toys, clothes, all these seasonal celebrations like Halloween and Christmas and Mother’s Day and all of this. A lot of the members of New Dream start off as young parents and realize that they would like more of a balance in the way that they’re living and that they want to convey this message to their children that sharing is really a great way to go. It’s just a group of moms who decided, hey, wait a minute, we want a more coordinated way of exchanging and reusing the clothes that we have, and then also sharing childcare at zero or low cost, so why don’t we get a room and pull everything together. And they’ve pulled it off. It’s amazing. Anyone can jump in and change their community, if they have the right tools.”

So! Do these projects inspire you? Revved up to start sharing? Got an idea for a project in your town, or on your block? Good news! This year’s Get2Gether winners will, as always, serve as mentors to next year’s winners – so get the ball rolling on your project now, and you may just find yourself working with these seasoned pros in 2016. Never too early to get started. And in the meantime, make like a New Dreamer: buy local, share, and green your community. You’ll make a much bigger splash than you thought you could!

The Boyle Heights neighborhood, once heavily Jewish and now primarily Latino, is a fascinating, multicultural community – just east of downtown Los Angeles – with a rich, American history. A landing and jumping off place for immigrants over the years, it’s still full of vibrant mom and pop shops. “Not your typical cookie cutter neighborhood,” explains Carlos Velásquez, Programs Committee Member with Multicultural Communities for Mobility (MCM), a local advocacy organization.

For many like Velásquez, the neighborhood holds a very special meaning. “Because of the place it holds in my Mexican immigrant history, it feels like a place that you want to go back to, a place you have a connection to,” he explains. “That’s very common for a lot of young people in my age group, where you have parents who might have come from Latin America. A lot of our parents went to that area first, and then left. So you kind of have that connection. It’s kind of nice to go back and help make it a much better place than it is now.”

Velásquez emphasizes that the work he and his colleagues are doing in the neighborhood is not about that flashy, in vogue “R” word: revitalization. “It’s more that it needs improvements here and there,” he explains. “Every shop is full!” What’s need, then, in lieu of “revitalization,” is much more of the kind of outreach that knows that any changes made to Cesar Chavez must be informed primarily by those who live in Boyle Heights.

“It’s really the lack of quality outreach,” explains Velásquez. In the course of the last 2-3 years, for example, several bike lanes have popped up in Boyle Heights, courtesy of the city. That’s wonderful news, of course; there are many in Boyle Heights who cycle because they have to. “You see a lot of young people riding bikes because it’s cool, because it’s good for the environment,” explains Velásquez. “These are people who ride bikes because they have to; that’s their only means of transportation. For them, it’s paramount.”

But the way those bike lanes came to be was troubling for Velásquez and his colleagues. “From speaking with people in the neighborhood,” he says, “they just kind of popped up.” Some residents continued to ride their bikes on the sidewalks, because no outreach had been done to let them know what regulations, if any, came with the new lanes. There was a sense in the community that they should have been consulted before this (albeit nice) thing had been done for them. That they should have been an integral part of the process.

Velásquez and his colleagues want those voices heard, next time around. To that end, this winter or early spring will see a big demonstration on Cesar Chavez Avenue, between Evergreen and St. Louis Streets. Event details will be in place once extensive research and outreach – MCM will be hosting sidewalk workshops with residents, businesses, community members – has been conducted in the neighborhood. What do residents need? What do they believe would make the street safer? What measures would reduce conflicts between cyclists and pedestrians? What kinds of new public spaces would improve the area and encourage community-building? Would a pop-up park be an interesting experiment? How about a protected bike lane? What roles will food, music, and public art play in the event?

The demonstration day itself will function essentially as a huge experiment, designed to invite the community’s reactions, feedback, and ideas for more permanent changes that might be made to Cesar Chavez Ave. “It’s much easier for people to comment on something that’s already there, than to give them a blank piece of paper,” says Velásquez.

What is set in stone at this point is the truly awesome roster of partners coming together to work on the project. Teaming up with MCM are YouthBuild, a fabulous local charter school with deep roots in community action, and Lot to Spot, an organization that works magic to empower neighborhoods, one vacant lot at a time.

Get involved

The project has already earned a whopping $10,000 in grant money via Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Great Streets Initiative, and citizen donations have started rolling in on their ioby campaign page, which you can check out here.