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Monday, April 12, 2004

I've been thinking more and more about the fantastic idea I learned about from Richard Johnson, current president of the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association. He (and many other great folks in HVNA) have been working long and hard on many of the same sorts of issues that all other communities in SF have been struggling with, and they've had some great successes.

Richard was explaining to me his idea about 'community budget balancing realities' (I'm still trying to figure out a good name for it) when we met for a couple hours last week. Basically, it's about communicating with people about the money spent by the city, on each neighborhood. Imagine if we could figure out that SF spends, let's say, $3mil on some neighborhood. From DPW coming out to pick up couches to the Dept of Health serving meals on wheels to the number of false alarms chased down by the SFFD. The total comes to $3mil. What if we could communicate the idea that if we all worked at it, we would still spend that $3mil on the neighborhood, but if instead of it being spent on couch pick up or maintenence from vandalism or disputes at the planning commission about two neighbors and their tree, it could go towards the POSITIVE stuff going on in the neighborhood. "oh, since DPW hasn't had to paint out graffiti since we got volunteers to do it regularly, we now have $50K to spend on an after school program in your neighborhood." Wow. wouldn't that be cool?

So, besides the massive accounting coordination it would take, how else would we actually accomplish savings that way? By utilizing volunteerism and community involvement in many of the ways I've been promoting for 5 years now. Check out my Trash solutions page for examples in that area.

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