Community Motive 🌎🌍🌏Think Local Planet, Act Regionally!: HUD & EPA Webcast - 2 pm Wednesday, June 15 - Notice of Funding Availability for the Capacity Building for Sustainable Communities Program

Received today - June 14, 2011

From: Sustainable Communities
Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 2:02 PM
To: Sustainable Communities
Subject: Announcing the Capacity Building for Sustainable Communities Program

HUD’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities and EPA’s Offices of Sustainable Communities, Water, and Brownfields and Land Revitalization are pleased to announce a joint Notice of Funding Availability for the Capacity Building for Sustainable Communities Program.

For the first time ever, HUD and EPA will join forces to competitively award $5.65 million to strengthen the capacity of existing grantees from each agency to create more housing choices, make transportation more efficient and reliable, and support vibrant and healthy neighborhoods for American families.

The award program will build upon the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, an innovative interagency collaboration, launched by President Obama in June 2009, between the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), HUD and EPA to provide more sustainable housing and transportation choices for families and lay the foundation for a 21st century economy. Award recipients will support a growing network of existing and future HUD and EPA grantees that are advancing sustainable regional planning and development. The network of grantees will exchange ideas on successful strategies, lessons learned, emerging tools, and public engagement plans. The Capacity Building for Sustainable Communities grant program will award funds to capacity building service providers who will work directly with grant recipients from the FY2010, and FY 2011 HUD Sustainable Communities Regional Planning and Community Challenge, HUD Preferred Sustainability Status Communities, and EPA Sustainable Community Technical Assistance and Brownfield Area Wide Planning grant programs.

Applications for the NOFA are due July 8, 2011. Nonprofit organizations, local or state public agencies, for-profit organizations, nationally recognized and accredited Universities or Colleges, or any combination of eligible entities as a Capacity Building Team are eligible to apply for funding. For more information on how to apply, please review the notice of funding availability (NOFA) by clicking here.

To see the press release for this initiative, please click here.

HUD and EPA will be hosting a webcast tomorrow, Wednesday, June 15, at 2 pm to discuss this new program. We will send out an email with the access information shortly.

For more information on this funding opportunity, please visit hud.gov/sustainability, or contact Rachel Kirby in HUD’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities at rachel.t.kirby@hud.gov.

In order to participate in Wednesday’s webinar, you will need both to call in by phone and to log in online. Instructions are as follows.

Telephone Access

In order to hear webinar audio, please call (877) 941-6029. There is no passcode—an operator will ask for your name and other optional information, and then connect you to the call.

Internet Access

In order to view the webinar, please visit https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/hud/join?id=58HH9B&role=attend. You can log on up to 30 minutes before the meeting start time. If that link doesn’t work for some reason, you can go to https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/hud/join and enter the meeting ID 58HH9B.

We urge you to check beforehand to ensure that LiveMeeting works on your computer. In case it does not, you may also use the attached slides to follow along.

We look forward to your participation.

Prototype for Global Coding of Political Geographies Library and Data Management – Wikipedia Example

The system is based on a geocode scheme set up for earth that focuses on established political boundaries as a basis for regional grouping of nations, states and localities. It is decimal system based to take advantage of the sort criteria for numbers in computers. It utilized the Sector Group and Region codes of the United Nations and ISO. Geographic information system technology does not solve the problem, but its tools can be used with the geocodes.

The geocode system effectively organizes Wikipedia entries as a library management and the geocodes can be used for data aggregation. This has been developed under a Creative Commons license and would benefit from a global network implementation where local users cooperatively related subnational geographic regions and component political geography.

Examples are at the links which follow:

1. Global Geocode Library Use Organizes Wikipedia Pages Geographically

2. Global Geocode Library Use Organizes U.S. State Wikipedia Pages Geographically

3. Global Geocode Library Organizes U.S. Sub-state and Multi-state Region Wikipedia Pages Geographically

4. Why focus on COGs/Regional Councils in the U.S.? "the substate district is essentially an administrative tool of states"

Contact: Tom Christoffel

Community Motive – Three Thoughts by Tom Christoffel, FeRSA, 3/16/09-revised 9/29/09; 9/26/11

Based on my experience as a regional planner and agency director, 1973 -2008, and in recognition of emerging "regional communities," I developed three thoughts about community that relate to the challenge of working across-boundaries as greater or regional communities. The thoughts/theses apply for communities at the scale of bonding or bridging social capital as defined by Robert D. Putnam, which is alternately local or regional. (link below)

As of 2011, considering the global financial crisis brought about by pursuit of the "profit motive," it struck me that this has come to dominate modern life. This is a relatively new invention of civilization and wasn't a concern for most of the time that homo sapiens has been on the planet.

The three thoughts below that had emerged in my experience of working on regional cooperation now represent what I now posit as the "community motive." Concern about "profit" can emerge within an established community over time, but, to my mind the "profit motive" does not exist in the wild.

1) Community precedes cooperation.
2) Community is how life solves all problems.
3) Security is the primary purpose of community.

These three thoughts, theses if you will, are the basis of the "community motive." Following is some exposition about each one.

As I see it, security has always been the priority for humans since the plains of Africa. That's why communities first seek to establish defensible boundaries. After the basics are in place, security focus shifts to the social and economic. Boundaries work like the membrane in the osmosis experiment most of us have seen in a science class. The membrane is a filter that lets the good things pass through, but keeps unwanted things out. (Osmosis -YouTube - 45 sec.)

The evolved political boundaries of today have consequence. The rules change when you cross them. Though marked on the ground and fortified in some instances, they are conceptual, as pictured above, with Universe Man. The boundary divides the space between local, that within, and regional, everything outside, as labeled in the second panel. The third panel repeats the image within, to show, without graphic elegance, that the land on which Universe Man sits is regional at another scale, as determined by other boundaries, and another area that's local. A territory is both local and regional, depending upon the perspective.

Communities of communities, “regional communities” are greater communities organized to solve a problem, be it managing a watershed, strengthening an economic cluster or ensuring peer competition for school sports. Regional boundaries can be imposed for administrative purposes within states, but for these to be a basis for effective cooperation, a greater community sense is needed for that geography among the people. This is true for multi-state and multi-national regional communities as well. The leaders with such a vision can build a regional community by finding that which is already in place.

This is not to suggest that community is easy to build in order to solve problems. In a crisis, humans of any culture, belief or politics can quickly come together and self-organize to save themselves and others. It was the on-the- ground response to the 9/11 attacks that demonstrated to me the deep responsiveness of human community, as well as the fundamental importance of security. Community is how humans have always survived. This, I think, extends to all life forms.

The "community motive" comes into play when there is a problem to be solved. In a monetized civilization, the "profit motive" may be an incentive for some action, but most of the problems of life don't have a check at the end for their solution. They are things that must be done. Because this is the case, humanity has been able to perpetuate. ©

For more on Regional Community and Scale, see the Slideshare box below.

To learn about bridging and bonding social capital, read Chapter 1 of Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival of American community By Robert D. Putnam

Community Motive 🌎🌍🌏Think Local Planet, Act Regionally!

HUD & EPA Webcast - 2 pm Wednesday, June 15 - Notice of Funding Availability for the Capacity Building for Sustainable Communities Program - Applications Due July 8

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"Community Motive" - What is it?

Prototype for Global Coding of Political Geographies Library and Data Management – Wikipedia Example

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Earth ( we know its a spherical whole)

Universe Man at the Boundary

Local Planet - Regional Space

Our Local Planet has systems of Political Geographies which combine as Regional/Greater Communities

Community Motive – Three Thoughts by Tom Christoffel, FeRSA, 3/16/09-revised 9/29/09; 9/26/11

Regional Community News

Financial Crisis - New Necessity for Cooperation

Slideshare - PowerPoints and PDFs

Regional "Communites of Practice"

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