How can we enable the Soundview residents to share resources, provide peer support and links to needed resources? How the park can become a platform for community engagement?
Proposal: Taste Sound View
Students: Siri Betts, James Clotfelter, Nelson Lo, Jie Wang
Built around the idea of a potluck, "Taste Sound View" was designed as an event that leveraged a social gathering around food as a catalyst to ignite community conversation towards aligning interests, facilitating networks, and revealing available resources. The project aims to amplify the involvement of the local Soundview community in the stewardship of their park and to provide the Friends of Soundview with tools that can be used to transform the park into a platform for community engagement. The toolkit we have developed will empower the Friends of Soundview Park with the means to initiate scalable opportunities for community intervention while inspiring projects that create and sustain a positive social change. Throughout the event itself, common interests were unearthed and connections grew organically. The platform we created worked well to promote community-based ideas and inspire further action. While this analogue toolkit successfully ignited the spark, it seems imperative that a sustained digital platform is available to distribute and archive information while maintaining these new networks and relationships. In this regard, the potential for LOCAST is clear. Ideally, all of the relevant details for projects in the Taste Sound View program would be accessible from this site. Collaborators, event calendars, photo/video documentation, and resource information would all be visible and easily navigated by participants and interested community members. In this scenario, other social platforms such as Wordpress and Twitter could serve as public windows into the Taste Sound View LOCAST page. In every circumstance, the LOCAST platform must be able to interface with the various social media platforms that are uniquely familiar to each user but LOCAST’s real success may be its ability to behave as a hub for project information.