Category: NeighborWorks

I’m home now, and I’ve final­ly man­aged to upload all of my pic­tures. You can view the set here. On Sun­day the Cleve­land Con­tin­gent met to cre­ate an action plan for a project here in town. We did­n’t have very long to work, but we decid­ed to struc­ture a sur­vey to be sub­mit­ted to Cleve­land youth in order to deter­mine what kinds of stuff they want from their com­mu­ni­ty. Once we’ve estab­lished some met­rics from this, we plan to ask May­or Jack­son to allow city employ­ees a few hours of flex-time every month to be used for vol­un­teer work asso­ci­at­ed with Cleve­land youth, so even if the city can’t afford to give CMSD more flow, they can at least show that they care enough for our chil­dren’s future to pro­vide man­pow­er. We del­e­gat­ed tasks and are meet­ing in very ear­ly June to con­tin­ue orga­niz­ing this process.

After this ses­sion we went to the Ryman Audi­to­ri­um for the clos­ing cer­e­monies and some tes­ti­fy­ing. One woman from Bat­tle Creek, MI gave thanks for me since I had a good dis­cus­sion with her on start­ing a com­mu­ni­ty-based web­site for her own neigh­bor­hood. Sev­er­al peo­ple through­out the con­fer­ence were quite inter­est­ed in the idea of a com­mu­ni­ty-site, so I’m glad I could be there to pro­vide some sparks.

The Nashville music scene is very strong and the per­form­ers are all quite pro­fes­sion­al. The music is fair­ly main­stream, unlike Cleve­land’s broad­er range of exper­i­men­ta­tion, but there are enough sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences in the cities that I think they could lean a lot from each oth­er.

Sim­i­lar­i­ties:
• Very diverse pop­u­la­tions
• Sim­i­lar pop­u­la­tion size [Actu­al­ly, Cleve­land has about 75k less]
• Great music scenes

Dif­fer­ences:
• Nashville is friend­lier and has an extreme­ly enthu­si­as­tic and vibrant may­or. [Not a slam on May­or Jack­son, but Bill Pur­cell was awe­some.]
• Cleve­land has bet­ter tech infra­struc­ture, a larg­er down­town and pub­lic trans­porta­tion [even if I had to walk the last mile after get­ting off the rapid].
• Nashville enter­tain­ment is much, much cheap­er.
• Cleve­land has a lake and parks all over the place and a larg­er vari­ety of enter­tain­ment.

To me, it seems like Cleve­land has bet­ter assets, but Nashville is lever­ag­ing theirs to more effect, which is why it is more of a des­ti­na­tion for tourists and peo­ple mov­ing to their area.