Women Take Center Stage…In Life…In Excelling…In Giving Back

Oddfellows Playhouse and the Community Foundation of Middlesex County and its Sari A. Rosenbaum Fund for Women & Girls are proud to host “Women Take Center Stage.” Playwright Liz Duffy Adams and Oddfellow’s Artistic Director Kristen Palmer will lead an insightful discussion about the power of Women in the Arts. In celebrating National Women’s History Month we will focus on the importance of the Arts in our communities. The Arts provide opportunities of leadership, empowerment, independence and collaboration. Join us as two extraordinary women take the stage to share their experiences as leaders in the arts.

Liz Duffy Adams is an American playwright whose plays have been produced in theaters throughout the country. Adams is a New Dramatists alumna and received various awards in fellowships, including a Women of Achievement Award. Her original play Buccaneers will have its East Coast premier at Oddfellows Playhouse on April 4^th.

Kristen Palmer is the Artistic Director at Oddfellows Playhouse. She has designed and implemented arts programs with many organizations, engaging students in their own creative processes. A playwright herself, her plays have been seen on stages from New York to Seattle.

Oddfellows Playhouse mission is to build essential life skills through the performing arts.  It was founded in 1975 as a community-based, multicultural theater program designed to include children from all backgrounds. Oddfellows remains Connecticut's largest and most active year-round youth theater, with live productions, classes, circus and community theater that annually serves over 600 young people and audiences in the thousands.

Community Foundation of Middlesex County is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life in Middlesex County.  Its two-fold mission is: (1) to work with charitably-minded individuals and organizations to build permanent endowments and other charitable funds; and (2) to support local nonprofit organizations through effective grant making and multiple programs to address community needs. Since its founding in 1997, the Community Foundation has provided 1,100 grants totaling more than $3.3 million to organizations for the arts, cultural and heritage programs, educational activities,  environmental improvements, and for health and human services. Sari A. Rosenbaum Fund for Women and Girls at the Community Foundation of Middlesex County is a permanent fund supporting grants to organizations that empower Middlesex County women and girls to be self-reliant and reach their potential. We welcome conversations with good people who want to do great things.  For more information, visit CFMC at www.MiddlesexCountyCF.org, contact us at 860.347.0025 and info@MiddlesexCountyCF.org, and follow us at www.facebook.com/CommunityFoundationMC.

For reservations to the event on March 11, 2014 from 5:30pm-7:30pm  please email Bessie@oddfellows.org or call (860) 347.6143.

For  more information contact:

Jeannette Archer-Simons

Interim Executive Director

860-347-6143 x 101 or 203-671-9773 (c)

Spring Cleaning + Nice Weather = Tag Sales

When I moved to Connecticut almost 12 years ago, it was early summer and one of the first social invitations I had was from a neighbor who asked me if I'd go around to tag sales with her. My reaction was, “What's a tag sale?” After it was explained to me in the manner that one might explain such a thing to a child, I said ”Oh, you mean a yard sale, or a garage sale. Why's it called a tag sale here?” “Well” came the answer, “because everything has a price tag on it.” Ok, fair enough. Twelve years later, on a windy spring day, I found myself manning a table at a neighborhood tag sale. It seems as though the tag sale bug hit Middletown full force on Saturday. I saw dozens of tag sale signs all around town. While sitting behind the table at our little sale, during slow periods I found myself thinking a lot about what motivates people to have tag sales. In many cases the money to be made from the sales can't be much of a an incentive, but in these tough economic times every little bit helps. After considering the time and effort it takes to haul things out and set them up, the small amount of money to be made, and then the problem of what to do with all the unpurchased leftovers, when faced with a pile of unwanted items many people choose instead to simply throw things in the trash or drop off as donations. Trashing and donating certainly are the more logical choices. This leads me back to the original question, why do people have tag sales? What tag sales achieve that trashing and donating do not are building of family and community. When you have a tag sale, you talk to your neighbors. You teach your kids some basic economics like supply and demand and some basic financial skills like recognizing the value of money, and some basic life skills like doing some honest work for a little pay. When you have a tag sale, you spend the day outdoors with the television turned off. You recycle things that are still useful. It can be very rewarding to have a bargain hunter walk away with something that makes them really happy while you are just as happy to get rid of it and to have it go to someone who wants it rather than having it go into the trash. A tag sale is a social event. It can be a fun family project or a day spent with good friends. Today, if someone new to Connecticut asked me the question, “What's a tag sale?” the answer might not be so obvious.

Learning From Athens

I appreciate Judith Brown’s posts about the idea of a district representative-council. Last night, while reading a town planning book on patterns found all over the world, I came across this research of how large a body of people can be represented most fairly. I found it inspiring. It was almost as though it were written expressly for us. I post it here as something to consider as we continue the discussion on how best to represent ourselves here and also think about future development in Middletown.

PATTERN #12: COMMUNITY OF 7000

Individuals have no effective voice in any community of more than 5000-10,000 persons.

People can only have a genuine effect on local government when the units of local government are autonomous … small enough to create the possibility of a link between the man in the street and his local officials and elected representatives.

This is an old idea. It was the model for Athenian democracy in the third and fourth centuries, B.C.; it was Jefferson’s plan for American democracy; it was the tack Confucius took in his book on government, The Great Digest.

For these people, the practice of exercising power over local matters was in itself an experience of intrinsic satisfaction. Sophocles wrote that life would be unbearable were it not for the freedom to initiate action in a small community. And it was considered that this experience was not only good in itself, but was the only way of governing that would not lead to corruption. Jefferson wanted to spread out the power not because “the people” were so bright and clever, but precisely because they were prone to error, and therefore it was dangerous to vest power in the hands of a few who would inevitably make big mistakes. “Break the country into wards” was his campaign slogan, so that mistakes will be manageable and people will get practice and improve.

Today the distance between people and the centers of power that govern them is vast – both psychologically and geographically. Milton Kotler, a Jeffersonian, has described the experience (1967):

The process of city administration is invisible to the citizen who sees little evidence of its human components but feels the sharp pain of taxation. With increasingly poor public service, his desires and needs are more insistently expressed. Yet his expressions of need seem to issue into thin air, for government does not appear attentive to his demands. This disjunction between citizens and government is the major political problem of city government, because it embodies the dynamics of civil disorder.

There are two ways in which the physical environment, as it is now ordered, promotes and sustains the separation between citizens and their government. First, the size of the political community is so large that its members are separated from its leaders simply by their number. Second, government is invisible, physically located out of the realm of most citizens’ daily lives. Unless these two conditions are altered, political alienation is not likely to be overcome.

1. The size of the political community…. Paul Goldman has proposed a rule of thumb that no citizen should be more than two friends away from the highest member of the local unit. Assume everyone knows about 12 people in his local community. Using this notion and Goodman’s rule, we can see that an optimum size for a political community would be 12 x 12 x 12 or about … 5500 persons.

2. The visible location for local government. Even when local branches of government are decentralized in function, they are often still centralized in space, hidden in vast municipal city-county buildings out of the realm of everyday life. These places are intimidating and alienating. What is needed is for every person to feel at home in the place of his local government with his ideas and complaints. A person must feel that it is a forum, that it is his indirectly, that he can call and talk to a person in charge of such and such, and see him personally in a day or two.

For this purpose, forums must be situated in highly visible and accessible places. They could, for instance, be located in the most active marketplace of each community of 5000 to 7000.

Therefore:

Decentralize city governments in a way that gives local control to communities of 5000 to 10,000 persons. As nearly as possible, use natural and geographic and historical boundaries to mark these communities. Give each community the power to initiate, decide, and execute the affairs that concern it closely: land use, housing, maintenance, streets, parks, police, schooling, welfare, neighborhood services.

Excerpted from A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al., 1977, pages 71-74.