Several weeks ago, an overly-aggressive salesman came to our
door. Polite refusals seemed to anger him, and he began to snarl
strange questions.
Several weeks ago, an overly-aggressive salesman came to our door. Polite refusals seemed to anger him, and he began to snarl strange questions. My husband, who was the one who spoke with him, found himself rising to the bait until he finally had to close the door, although the man wanted to keep arguing. He considered the incident disquieting enough to mention it to me hours later.
The next day, we learned that one of our neighbors thought she had heard someone trying her door late at night.
These two events in rapid succession made me think, “Wow, we need to share this information with all our neighbors, so we can collectively keep an eye out.”
In the old days, this would be an easy matter. You’d see your neighbor and tell him. But nowadays people stay in their cars, windows up, and click the remote control to open the garage door. They may wave and smile, but then they disappear into the garage, and you never get a chance to talk.
So I formed the idea to create a group online. I had belonged to one in my old neighborhood in Oakland, and it was a very active clearinghouse for all kinds of information.
People would post about yard sales or a lost cat, or ask for a referral to a handyman or a cleaning service. We were walking distance to a wonderful, quaint retail row so people would discuss new restaurants opening there (for a while, there was a corner spot of rotating restaurants that just couldn’t make a go of it.) My neighbors would even warn each other if they noticed our infrequent speeding ticket cop waiting to catch speeders going down the hill.
And of course, people would post to the listserv when their car was broken into, or on a rare occasion, their house. It was a wonderful network that allowed us instant access to information we needed.
I created a Yahoo group for my current Gilroy neighborhood, which took all of five minutes. The most complicated part was choosing the color scheme for the page. Then I typed up a half-sheet inviting people to join it. I beat the streets, delivering one sheet to each house in a zone I’d predetermined.
Progress was slow because my valued assistant paused every 3.5 seconds to do her own networking, with roly-polies. The first day we delivered about 20 flyers, and later that day I checked the site and saw that the first person had joined.
That person’s post perfectly illustrated how valuable this online forum could be. They disclosed that someone had tried to break into their house days prior, taking the screens off windows that faced the backyard. Sobering news: we had quickly advanced from someone thinking they might’ve heard an intruder at the door, to someone having raw proof of an entry attempt.
The next day, I was able to deliver another dozen flyers, and one more person joined the group. The third day, another dozen deliveries, and two new members. At the time of this writing, I haven’t completed approaching all our neighbors, and our nascent group boasts a mere handful of members. I trust that as time goes on the group will grow, because we all need to feel connected to our neighbors.
Starting a group like this might not be a bad idea for your neighborhood too. It’s a matter of minutes to set up a group on Yahoo, and it’s free (I considered setting it up as a Facebook page, but that eliminates the option of keeping one’s identity private since most people belong under their real names.) With a Yahoo group, you can set up a specific profile for a group, with a name that protects your privacy, and then have posts forward to your regular email address, hiding that address from the other members.
You can elect to get messages posted to the forum instantly forward to your email, or if you predict a barrage (not yet the case for this Gilroy group, but my old neighborhood … whew) you can elect to have a daily digest instead. That means all the day’s posts are collected into one single email you get in the evening.
I made a point of writing on the flyer that the listserv should be used only for discussing issues that relate to our neighborhood, not politics or religion. When a listserv works right, it’s a fabulous bit of community activism at its smallest level.
