Strong Towns Chicago - April Volunteer Night

I spent my Monday afternoon taking a nice walk up to the Near North Side. I cross the bridge over the Chicago river, passing all the landmarks I commonly go by on North LaSalle: The Super McDonalds, LaSalle Flowers, The Moody Campus, Christ the Savior. I saw a man being arrested at the gas station across the street from the Super McDonalds, they had like 5 cop cars, he must have done something bad or CPD was bored.

I go a bit further down LaSalle than I usually do, cutting through Near North Side toward Old Town. I walk over to Oak, then to Wells, then finally to Division to get to my eventual destination, The Near North Chicago Public Library Branch! Today’s stop on the event circuit was the Strong Towns Chicago April Volunteer Night. My good friend Faye posted into the Chicago Mail User Group mailing list encouraging us to attend, the day prior. I haven’t been to many civic/urbanism meetups in Chicago, besides ChiHack Night, so this seemed like a good thing to engage with. I am really glad I did!

I got to the library a bit early, it is actually where I wrote my previous blog post. It was nice to be in a public space like that, I don’t go to libraries often enough. When the meetup started, it was a small group of fellow urbanists. It wasn’t impossing or uncomfortable at first impressions, there weren’t many initial hellos, but that quickly opened up as the event went on.

I sat next to a nice man named Matt, he said he hadn’t been back to the meetup in a while. Like Matt, many of the people here were familiar with the meetup and were logn time attendees. However, I was not the only new person there, another fellow South Looper was also here for the first time! We all made some introductions and talked about what we were going to work on. I introduced myself and gave a bit of a rundown of how I found out about the meetup. The organizer actually knew Faye and was happy to hear about her promoting the event. I didn’t know what I could work on, so I partnered with, who I assume was, the co-organizer. We worked on the slideshow presentation to engage new members with the strong towns movement and urbanism more broadly. During, I learned a lot about how to get involved! I learned about witness slips, a concept I had heard about but never went in depth with. I filled out the two active witness slips that they had presented on their website, one for allowing Faith-based housing/residential development on church grounds, and another about ADUs. Learn more about Strong Towns Chicago and how you can get involved here!

I found one thing particularly funny about the event. Of course if you have seen me recently, you know I use two laptops, and one with an external keyboard and mouse. It is a pretty odd setup. The organizer came up to me to ask if I was an Emacs user, of course clocking me correctly. I was very surprised by this, because many don’t even know what Emacs is, and especially know of it enough to correctly identify a user so casually haha. I showed him my setup, and talked about how I use it to write for the blog here.

Another thing I would like to do with the Mail User Group is to continue posting and discussing events like this. I might even remove the language of “tech” event from the welcome message. Email is not just about facilitating more tech, but making the world more connected in a manner that is free, open, and orderly. It has been great, recent threads have focused on the Chicago City Nature Blitz(Thanks Irene!), The Chicago Water Week(Thanks Everett!), and more things that are not exclusively tech focused. Also, I now have even more ideas of ways to improve community engagement with Agency Economy!