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Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood examined More than kiddy ideas
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Matthew Shapiro is a proactive person, running for City Council, and he contains visions of introducing new ways of doing things.
If elected, Shapiro would seriously insist the community revolve around neighborhoods, and increasing the dialogue between individual links in the community to form one big chain.
He puts it better than that. Simply, “neighborhoods are the kindergarten for democracy,” he defiantly said.
He explains building the capacity to create power in the city comes from the power in neighborhoods.
“Power is not something that resides in one person’s hands,” he said, “and if we are to deal with the challenges in the coming years we must make neighborhoods the center of public life.”
Firstly, Shapiro would establish a fully staffed office of neighborhoods that can provide technical assistance and training to help neighborhoods so they may involve more residents in developing vision for community and be able to address issues in a creative way.
“A lot of cities across the country have departments that serve neighborhoods,” Shapiro said. “We only have one staff person in planning, focusing on planning, not facilitation, training or community building,” he added.
Shapiro is also interested in creating neighborhood assemblies, where on a quarterly basis, the mayor and the city council go out into five or six regions of the city to meet with the neighborhood association, residents and local businesses in a formal, facilitated meeting for several days.
“I would like to see the actual development of policies utilizing the neighborhood regional issues, concerns and their ideas,” he said.
He then envisions the foundation gained from these assemblies taken back into city hall where the policies are developed on a citywide basis and formalized.
“If we do this, we would be on a very good track,” he said.
Shapiro is the co-founder of Neighborhood Services, Incorporated. He has been involved with neighborhood and community projects for six years. Through this experience, he learned a great deal about the activities happening around the country with various neighborhood associations.
His political muse is Mary Parker Follett, who wrote in 1918 a book entitled, “The New State”.
“This book is incredible,” Shapiro said. “It re-defines our notions of politics, diversity, democracy and neighborhood. It was cutting edge in 1918, and it is still cutting edge.”
He mentioned Follett’s book to be the inspiration of his attention toward neighborhoods.
The book “gave me ideas that power is created within human interaction, and it is not something that can be transferred. Once human beings learn to integrate our ideas and values on larger and larger levels, starting within the family and within the neighborhood, then we will taste democracy.”
U
ntil then, he says we are just a crowd.
“I see the role of a leader in Boise as helping us shift from being a crowd to a community, and that is not the kind of leadership you see coming out of any elected officials.”
Laura Wylde