From:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...l=968342212737
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Being (more) neighbourly
COMMUNITY |
Apr. 16, 2006. 02:50 AM
LESLIE SCRIVENER
STAFF REPORTER
In Toronto, we like to celebrate our diversity, but we also know the reality is often not as rosy as the cheery "most multicultural city in the world" tag would suggest.
How do we get to know each other better so that our differences, whether cultural or linguistic, help build a more vibrant community?
Charles Pascal of the Atkinson Charitable Foundation has a simple idea: organize international exchanges for young people right here at home. He'd call it the Toronto World Exchange Program.
A Muslim high school student born in Pakistan would go live for a school term in the home of a Catholic student born in the Philippines, for example.
"We have the world in our backyard — are we taking advantage of it?" asks Pascal, executive-director of the foundation founded by Joseph Atkinson, a former Toronto Star publisher. Living in another family's culture, a student would learn different customs, different food, hear a different language and most of all, build a bond.
"Sometimes people are hard of listening, and there's not enough empathy and respect for others' views. This is a very simple idea that would lead to deepened insight and respect."
It's a way of drawing people who live close together closer together. In Toronto, where immigrant families from 90 different ethnic groups make up about half the population, according to Canada's 2001 census, there are still deep divisions. A recent projection from Statistics Canada says that by 2017, Toronto and area could have a population of 7.1 million, with a visible minority population of as high as 3.9 million.
"The long-term gain seems to be eluding us — people keep falling back along their own ethnic lines," says Ratna Omidvar, executive director of the Maytree Foundation, which, among other things, supports programs that help newcomers settle. "The thinking had been the parents might hang out on their own, but the children would bridge both worlds."
In her dream of the future, each of us would extend the hand of friendship to someone outside our socio-economic, cultural or educational group. Someone in Rosedale would have a friendship with someone from Jane and Finch; someone from China would befriend someone from India.
The question really is, how do we build communities in a city as big as Toronto? How do you get people out of their houses and apartments to connect and know each other by name?
Turn off the power, suggests Frances Lankin, head of the United Way. "Remember what happened in the blackout? People saw stars and felt a sense of adventure. What if we planned for it? What if we turned off the lights for a couple of hours and experienced the magic of coming together? You can't watch TV or listen to the radio, do the dishes or the laundry, and life slows down, and with nothing else to do, real communication takes place. We can engage one another."
She calls her plan "lights out Toronto" and adds: "It's probably impractical, but it's the spirit we need to recover."
Councillor Joe Mihevc's idea for community engagement is more grassroots. Let's say you have a sprawling, sunny backyard. It's not a nuisance, exactly, but it's a blank, grassy space you keep intending to do something with, but never get around to. Let's say you have a neighbour not so generously endowed with land, but longing to get his hands into the earth and grow a garden.
Ward 21's Mihevc, who's active in community issues, sees such a juxtaposition of garden haves and have-nots as a perfect opportunity for building a stronger community. He says a community listserv or bulletin board would easily link the busy neighbour with the empty space and the one with the green thumb. Their partnership could yield not only tumbling vines of sweet tomatoes and rows of exotic types of lettuce, to be shared by both and maybe even other neighbours, but also co-operation and friendship in a big city that, let's face it, can be isolating at times."You agree to take someone into your own private space, and from good people to good people, you share the produce and the flowers," says Michael Leventson, director of the City Farmer, a group based in Vancouver that encourages urban agriculture. "There's lots of wins here."
He notes that a community organizer would need to sort out the pairings, and gardeners would have to be vetted because they would be working on someone else's property.
Mihevc has another idea: Get neighbours to organize themselves into Kyoto-compliant groups who'd help each other to make their homes as energy-efficient as possible. They'd do energy audits of one another's homes, work together to make the upgrades in their houses, and have communally owned lawnmowers and bicycles. It sounds radical, but when Mihevc talks about neighbours sharing a car, posting a list of who's going where at a particular time so that the car is fully used, it sounds smart as well as plausible. And finally, Mihevc suggests that neighbours gather to research their local street histories, using expertise from the city archives or libraries. Who knows which colourful characters once populated your street? The information could be filed in the local library. A shared neighbourhood history — now that's community.