Capitola Cares

January 20th, inauguration day, we attended a celebration at our local bookstore, the Capitola Book Cafe with about 100 other locals. The room was packed with folks moved by the historic nature of the day and the chance to restore faith in our country. As Obama spoke, calling Americans to get involved in their communities, to organize, to participate, we looked around and thought, let’s do it. We felt like that moment, the moment where a hundred people all together were ready to commit, could be lost if we didn’t take action. It’s great to call people to community service, but if there’s not enough structure in place to offer easy opportunities to participate, the moment will pass and folks will go on to leading their (usually) crazy, hectic lives.

So it came down to answering these questions: How can we encourage participation and build community? What are the barriers that exist with what’s already in place? What tools can we use to accomplish our goal?

There are many segments of our community who are not yet engaged in service or involved in their community.   And there are others who would like to help, but don’t know where to start or how to find the best opportunity; and those who are not able to make long term commitments to volunteer work, but may have time and inclination to help out sporadically.

What we realized is that people are good hearted but overwhelmed. So, in the Obama tradition of asking for a little from a lot of people (his online micro-donation fundraising strategy ) we decided to come up with a way for people to give a little community service: micro-service. While there are many great organizations focused on providing needed services in our community, there is something missing — the one on one connection – neighbor to neighbor.   A caring and connected community can meet needs, such as helping a neighbor with a broken leg walk their dog, driving a disabled neighbor to the drug store, getting a group of people to clean up trash on the beach one Saturday afternoon, or organizing a “dine local” event to help out local businesses.

We need an easy way for neighbors to connect and help each other out.

We believe we can build on models for engagement and activism which already exist. Recent online political models to engage citizens have been (and continue to be) very successful.  The key is that a small commitment is asked of a lot of people.  We envision that if it were easy for a person to find (or create) a service opportunity and if it required only a one time or limited commitment (no strings attached), many more people would participate.   Think of this as micro-service, (similar to micro-loans).  We will ask everyone in our community to do a little bit of service.  Once they have done so, we believe that it is more likely that this person will help out again or perhaps ask for help in the future.   And with each act of service, community ties are strengthened and a caring community is built.

Craigslist.org already presents an efficient and successful means of providing information about volunteering in your community. People can either post a request for help or an offer to help, and announce and invite participation in community activities. Think of it as giving community members the ability to sample micro-service opportunities. And it is easy with minimal training or help needed to participate. Our plan is to train a whole community how to use this function of Craigslist.org. It’s a giant experiment and a call to action.

This is a grassroots, self organized, community moderated model.  We hope that this online service and the community activism it motivates will inspire other communities to call their residents to service.