Tag Archives: community engagement

Getting good done in Cleveland: Over $180,000 raised with matches

September 19, 2019Clevelandart, community engagement, match, racial justiceNoah Lumbantobing

It’s still September but we’re ready to say that this was one of our best years yet in Cleveland. Really! All across the city, neighbors proved what we’ve long known—when you set out to get good done, Clevelanders are ready to lend you a hand.

Earlier this year we launched three crowdfunding matches—the Common Ground match with support from The Cleveland Foundation and Neighborhood Connections, the Cuyahoga Arts & Culture Match Fund with support from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, and the Racial Equity Matching Fund with support from Neighborhood Connections. With ioby’s match fund opportunities, resident donations on ioby.org are matched dollar for dollar, helping to grow neighbor’s impact even further. We closed out all three matches last month, and all told neighbors have crowdfunded over $180,000 together to fight for racial justice, bring art and cultural opportunities to the neighborhood, bridge divides to strengthen our communities, and grow our movement for positive civic change.

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How to grow community engagement for your sustainability project

December 1, 2017Neighbors making neighborhoodscities, communities, community engagement, design, government, planning, sustainabilityKatie Lorah

If you’re a devoted sustainability planning or policy leader in the public sector today—particularly within a city or state government office or agency—you’ve probably asked yourself one or more of these questions:

How can we be sure we’re responding quickly and effectively to residents’ ideas and needs concerning environmental issues?

In our planning processes, how can we include the voices of residents in neighborhoods with long histories of disinvestment?

How can we expand and deepen our community engagement with a tight budget and scarce resources?

Well, we have a few ideas, courtesy of some outstanding ioby Leaders, projects, and friends:

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Measuring Neighborhood Resilience, Part II

July 3, 2013News, Under the Hoodcivic engagement, community engagement, connection to community, neighborhood resilience, poptech, resilience, surveyErin Barnes

In preparing for our presentation at PopTech on neighborhood resilience, we decided to take a small sample of three ioby projects to find out how participating in ioby projects makes neighborhoods more cohesive.

Small actions—donating $40 or volunteering on a weekend—are opportunities for participation with a relatively low barrier to entry. In addition, because ioby projects tend to be small scale or short term, a participant is likely to see the positive impact of her own contribution fairly quickly. We believe these small actions and easy opportunities for participation can be a gateway drug for civic engagement. This is why we believe local participation is a key element, if not a backbone, of any definition of resilience that accounts for social systems.

It’s not a statistically significant sample; n is only 37, but it does suggest some trends. What we found out was that most people who responded had already been a little bit involved in the project before the project became an ioby project. And that 40% of people became more involved after donating or volunteering for the first. That is to say that their first action—what ever it was—was a gateway drug to deeper involvement.

And 95% of respondents felt a deeper connection of some kind to their community, including a whopping 21% who felt like they are an important part of their community after participating.

Every single respondent feels more connected to their neighbors in some way—recognizing their faces, saying hello, knowing their names, feeling more comfortable chatting with them—after participating in the project. A few people wrote in saying even that they felt safer in the neighborhood after participating.

Which begs, “Is this neighborhood resilience?” Is knowing your neighbors names resilient? Does feeling more attached to your community make the neighborhood stronger?

That’s what we would like to find out, with your help. Because of the nature of our work with active and involved citizens, ioby has tremendous potential to contribute meaningful data to these questions. We would like to expand our data collection and tracking to include a variety of possible key indicators of resilience at the neighborhood scale, including indicators similar to what we’ve shown here. But we’re going to need your help making our data useful to others in this emerging field, and we’re going to need support to make it robust. Please join us along the way.