PROPOSALS FOR SOMERVILLE

The following proposals were submitted for discussion by attendees of the Somerville Community Summit Follow-Up Meeting on Saturday, April 27 from 12-2pm at the Somerville Community Center—and to be read by interested Somerville community members who cannot attend the meeting.

Anyone who would like to help work on any of the proposals should contact the person who submitted it at the email address listed at the top of each proposal.

The proposals are listed in the order they were received.

A. Proposal for Union Square Neighborhood Council Programming 

Submitted by Gary S. Trujillo on 4/19/19. To support, email gst@webruary.org.

This informal proposal seeks to assemble a small team to handle recording and production tasks associated with enabling people in the Union Square area, and in Somerville generally to follow the activities of the Union Square Neighborhood Council (USNC) by means of video programming. Tasks would entail doing video recording of bi-monthly meetings and occasional special events, as well as doing whatever video editing might be required to make videos suitable for presentation on the USNC web site and on SCATV.

Background

The USNC has existed since December, 2017. It exists for the purpose of providing a community voice in the conversation that has been taking place for a number of years regarding redevelopment in the Union Square area, home of the Somerville Media Center and many other institutions and businesses that we all know and love, and where some of us live. The USNC was brought into being as the result of more than a year of frequent meetings, most held at the public safety building, in facilities belonging to the Somerville police station in which a variety of people who live, work and operate businesses came together to think about establishing an entity to represent our needs, desires and vision for an area where we know that a transformation is now happening. We want changes that are made to be consistent with out ideas about what makes the Union Square area so special to us, and to preserve and protect what we know and love while being part of the process of change and growth. (More details of this process and how USNC is participating in it can be seen on the USNC web site.)

Some video production has already been done, as can be seen from looking at the USNC web site. However, we have limited personnel to handle what is needed to produce video on a regular basis to the standards required for broadcast. We are now working on trying to build the necessary skills to do what is necessary to improve our production quality, but that process is happening at a slower pace than what is required to handle the backlog of material we have managed to record. We are open to thinking collaboratively about ways of improving our production capacity that do not require a long-term commitment, though we are certainly open to working on an ongoing basis with people who share our vision and could even help us improve what we are doing in ways we have yet to imagine.

Project Goal

Due to a number of factors, it is difficult for many people in Somerville who are interested (or would be interested if they knew about us and what we’re doing and hoping to do) to participate in our meetings and events. We hope that by having a substantial video presence, we can make more people in the city, especially those living, working and operating businesses in the Union Square area, aware of our existence, what we are doing, how we operate and how they can, if they choose, become involved in what we do in one way or another. We also want to make it easily possible for those who have an interest either in our overall activities or some specific subset of what we strive to achieve (e.g. parks and other open spaces) to know what is going on within the USNC and perhaps to participate by means other than in-person presence.

We look forward to being in touch with those who might like to be a part of this important enterprise!

B. Green Somerville Media

Using media outreach to build sustainability through community.

Submitted by Larry Yu on 4/25/19. To support, email lyu@speakeasy.net.

The city of Somerville is at a critical moment in its sustainability journey. The City has just published its climate action plan, called Somerville Climate Forward. And the last remaining districts slated for redevelopment, including Union Square, Inner Belt and Brickbottom, will be re-zoned and built in the next decade. Meanwhile, the remainder of the city consists of older housing stock, which is a challenge to retrofit for sustainability and livability.

Can Somerville meet its sustainability goals (i.e., become carbon neutral by 2050) and live up its SomerVision values around sustainability?

Proposal

The sustainability journey is a hero’s journey. Neither the heroes nor the villains, in this case, are in City Hall or in real estate developers’ offices; they’re in the homes and businesses in the city, where a culture of sustainability is beginning to take hold.

Green Somerville Media will tell those stories, using narrative approaches to tell stories of people and their projects, reality show style. Projects would leverage collaborations among resources found in the city, and catalyze new programs and initiatives. For example, a story arc could include:

• A homeowner or renter consulting with a team from the community, pro bono, to inspect a property (a la the state’s Mass Save program) and give advice on rainwater management, from gutters and downspouts, to rain barrels, to de-paved driveways and yards, to basement flood prevention, to planting native gardens over those de-paved yards.
• Contractors could be brought in to work on gutters and downspouts with city-negotiated discounts (a la Solarize, Heat Smart/Cool Smart).
• A team from Green & Open Somerville could organize a community-driven de-paving party.
• Contractors could be brought in to work on grading and French drains in de-paved yards with city-negotiated discounts (a la Solarize, Heat Smart/Cool Smart).
• A team of youth from Groundwork Somerville could re-plant the new yard with native plants that restore the local ecosystems.

The whole story arc could be capture on video. Think of it as This Old House (perhaps with a more charismatic narrator). Along the way, different stories could be told about the organizations that are helping out, and the impacts on the community and the environment.

The series of videos would be hosted on the web, with more frequent prose stories about sustainability in Somerville – people and policy, buildings and infrastructure, events and weather.