Coming March 29 through April 19: our pilot launch of the Bryn Mawr Community Gathering Program! Think of it as a pop-up hyperlocal think-tank, but with short live music performances and potluck food.
Interested? Let us know here!
Our vision is that each meeting feels like a special place to be, for neighbors of all ages. We hope for participation from older adult neighbors to elementary-age children of Bryn Mawr.
Why now? Why local?
We want to meet and work together with our Bryn Mawr neighbors* to collectively shape our community. This is hard work! There will certainly be many different visions for our neighborhood. But that is exactly what we want to get more practiced at: making space for sometimes tricky dialogues and negotiations in order to accomplish shared goals.
The process of determining our collective action will take the group through a journey of navigating local bureaucracies – that’s part of the point of this whole idea. This work will be a critical lesson in identifying the levers we have accessible to us to get things done as a local community.
Our inaugural topic will be [drumroll, please]… The Pedestrian Experience in Bryn Mawr.
Your devoted program organizers** are busily filling in programming details. If you join (when you join!) here’s what you can expect:
- Gatherings will be hosted at Big Hill Books in downtown Bryn Mawr from 2:30pm to 4:30pm on the following Saturdays: March 29; April 5; and April 19 [note the extra week between the second and third meetings]
- At the first gathering, we’ll meet each other and start learning about:
- research on pedestrian experience improvement/enhancement
- work already being done in Bryn Mawr in this area
- the relevant public authorities (like Public Works, the City Council, etc)
- We’ll also have a facilitated discussion about our different visions and values for how it could feel to walk around our neighborhood, and come up with a few different ideas for taking action.
- Our second gathering will see participants proposing different potential actions we could initiate to enact our visions for the Bryn Mawr pedestrian experience.
- We’ll discuss, debate, and finally, prioritize different actions we can begin taking together
- Before we leave, we’ll dole out some homework assignments before our final gathering in two weeks’ time
- At our final gathering, we will strive to agree on some kind of collective action to take.
- We’ll come up with an action plan for putting our vision in motion, and ask for commitments by participants to take responsibility for different parts of that plan
Interested in participating? Let us know here!
That’s it! This will be our first iteration of this program, and we anticipate learning a lot for future versions.
*Who is invited to participate? If you live, work, and/or play in Bryn Mawr, this is for you.
**Who are the organizers? Colleen and Ben (Area 6) moved to Bryn Mawr in 2020; prior to living here, we did creative community organizing work in Los Angeles, facilitating a salon series and creating community-building events that blended civic participation, food, and storytelling.
Bethanne (Area 5) opened Spruce in June 2020 with a mind to use the space for fostering community and supporting local artists.