Those of us who live in downtown neighborhoods are a fractured bunch. We imagine we live in villages, but ours aren’t the classic New England kind with a town hall, a general store, a local school, a town green, a united church incorporating several previously antagonistic denominations and a town meeting once a year.
We fill in the gaps with neighborhood associations, book groups and other neighborhood clubs, and the sidewalk, restaurants and local businesses that offer places for us to greet one another and catch up.
One increasingly common community builder is web-based—it’s an email forum or networking group using LISTSERV, Majordomo, bigtent.com or Google Groups that connects subscribers who are interested in the same topic and want to discuss it online without having to take extra time to go a web site like Facebook or Twitter. Often that topic is the neighborhood. And it often emerges from a neighborhood’s mothers. That is the age group that knows about this sort of thing.
“Since I came back I had to find some sort of community,” said Jessica Della Russo, who grew up in the North End and lives there again with her 5-year-old son, Ezio. She said people used to rely on telephones and telephone chains, but email groups are easier.
“I’m especially interested in finding options about being able to afford living in the city,” she said. The email networking group started by another North End mother a few years ago has helped her find and enjoy those options.
In 2009 the North End Waterfront Mother’s Association (NEWMA) email group became a “Google Group.” It has attracted 636 subscribers, not all of whom are mothers, nor do they necessarily live in the North End. Jessica has become one of the group’s moderators, and it was she who introduced me to the influence these groups are having.
Groups typically are not filtered through anything or anyone but a moderator who approves membership. The group is usually self-regulated, with participants complaining if someone gets out of line. And mercifully, compared to Facebook, commercial messages are unwelcome unless it’s something free.
The way groups work is that you find the web site and join the group, or you might receive an invitation. Then you receive emails from members in the group. You can send to the whole group, or reply to just the emailer.
I joined the LISTSERV group in the New England town where one of my daughters lives. We spend a lot of time there, I know many of her neighbors, and I want to follow their concerns. A recent hot topic focused on how to affordably repair a washed-out road. I just read the emails. I don’t send any myself. My daughter tells me I’m what is known as a lurker.
I’m now lurking in the NEWMA group too. (Jessica says that’s okay.) Recent messages from subscribers range widely. One noted that enrollment time for the Boston Public Schools starts in January. Several messages detail activities at the North End Branch Library, the North End Music and Performing Arts Center and the Greenway. A salon offered free blow-dries. One family had a toddler bed they were offering for free. Another family wanted to borrow a VCR. Did anyone know of a parking space for rent? A Northeastern grad student offered her babysitting services. A child lost his stuffed monkey at the playground. His mother wondered if anyone had found it.
Illustrating a trend in expensive, school-deprived, downtown Boston, a family moving to Newton wanted to rent out their two-and-a-half bedroom North End apartment. (What is a half bedroom?) But most of the interchange is from families with long-term downtown Boston plans, and the emails are not only about children’s matters.
“I’ve gotten some nice feedback from people who now feel more involved and even secure enough to propose their own initiatives, like a recent tot lot clean up,” said Jessica in an email.
The North End isn’t the only neighborhood to have an active email networking group, but they are all different. The South End Garden Moms, which started as mothers having coffee at the now-defunct Garden of Eden restaurant, claim a membership of about 2,000 subscribers. This group probably really wants only moms, since the moderator wouldn’t let me in. JP Moms also is a group.
Jessica says groups like these are a natural outgrowth of people knowing how to use technology and wanting to use it to find a sense of community in their own back yard. “I find it fascinating to trace how a neighborhood or community evolves in this day and age,” she says.
It looks as if that evolution involves the Internet as well as the sidewalk.