Village Building Convergence

Community Site Application for VBC2010 is now available HERE

Please share this with anyone you know who may be interested in community projects for spring 2010!

Any community can participate in VBC. It doesn’t matter where you live in the Portland area, how much support you have, or how developed your ideas are at this point. If you have a sincere desire to create beautiful public spaces where you live or work; if you’re willing to reach out to your neighbors and work with them on a collaborative group project, meeting as needed until the event; if you’re ready to open up to the beauty and diversity in the community around you, then you’re ready for the VBC, because it’s all is about celebrating community and building it together.

The Village Building Convergence 2010 will be taking place from May 28th to June 6th. You can reach us by email at vbc@cityrepair.org

The second thing to do is take the first step in building community. Meet your community! We highly recommend gathering as many neighbors as you can at a community potluck to meet one another and introduce the idea of a community project with VBC. You can start by brainstorming ideas and possibilities based on community values and needs that are shared among the group. If excitement or questions arise, contact us to arrange to meet a placemaking mentor, who can tell you more about VBC and answer your questions specifically! This is for anyone and everyone, so grab an app and start today, let’s see where it will take us!

Site submissions for 2012 are CLOSED!

The VBC12 Community Site Declaration of Interest & Request for Proposal is now closed for 2012.

Thank you for all of the great site submissions! If you missed the deadline for this year, don't fret!

You can still attend the Village Building Convergence May 25- June 3 and help other sites with their projects
- great experience for starting yours next year!

Below, you may still read information about applying to be a Placemaking Site in the future.

Please read all of the information below, as you may find it quite helpful in clarifying what the Village Building Convergence is and if applying to be a project is the right thing for your community.

Help us help you!

This year, we are asking $50 be submitted with this Request For Proposal. More information about how to do this is described below, and scholarships are available.

We want to help facilitate your community change the spaces where you live, work or play, into more meaningful, beautiful and ecological places. Places that you have a hand in designing and creating. We call this process “placemaking,” and we’ve been helping people do it for 12 years, facilitating projects all across the city and beyond.

The following paragraphs offer information about the event and how you and your neighborhood can be involved. Whether you are a member of an existing group (such as a school) seeking more community involvement in your project, or an individual who has chatted with your neighbors about building closer community ties, we can help you move forward. You’re not expected to have any concrete plans at this point, whether you’re planning a specific structure or have no idea what to do, the placemaking process is intended to assist your group, providing assistance with design, facilitation, coordination, logistics, fund-raising, permits and city interfacing, advertising, and more.

All of the funds generated from this application fee will go directly back into materials and resources for the projects to be made possible. Super cool!

Who We Are

The non-profit organization, City Repair, is an organized group action that educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live. City Repair facilitates artistic and ecologically-oriented placemaking through projects that honor the interconnection of human communities and the natural world. The many projects of City Repair have been accomplished by a mostly volunteer staff and thousands of volunteer citizen activists.

The Village Building Convergence (VBC) is the largest annual project of City Repair, and is now in it’s twelfth year! Each year, through a massive volunteer effort and diverse partnerships between neighborhoods, schools, government agencies, businesses, organizations and individuals, the VBC is a statement of our combined dedication to create the world in which we want to be living. At its root, the VBC is about actively building our community, and realizing the strength and beauty of our power when we work and play together. By building a physical and social village infrastructure we are realizing our common visions for a lively and sustainable urban community.

The 12th Annual VBC is scheduled to take place May 25 - June 3, 2012. A ten-day event where neighborhoods activate to build shared public places and eco-oriented projects they have envisioned, designed, funded, and will maintain for themselves. VBC12 will include handson education in permaculture design and construction, ecological building, and public art! All projects are accomplished through collaboration, community conversations and commitment of a neighborhood to strengthen itself. Projects are founded on developing strong local relationships, social capital and equity, placemaking, ecological design, supporting our local economy, and developing our city and bioregion as a network of interconnected Village Centers. Everyone is invited to attend evening events at a central location, to participate in workshops or listen to visionaries speak about various aspects of sustainable culture and positive world transformation.

VBC will feature many projects located in or adjacent to the public right of way, and private projects that support community, in various neighborhoods. Private site projects will be structures or systems that are built by and available to the communities concerned with that site, and hopefully available to some extent to the larger community. These will include public squares and meeting houses, community kiosks and benches, solar-powered and artistic innovations, and many other new ideas. Each project is initiated and managed by neighborhood groups with support from the VBC Placemaking Committee. This year especially, we would also like to focus and assist all sites in incorporating fun and inspiring plans for planting insectaries and incentivising very easy strategies to address climate change on a 'small' scale, in whatever way best supports their project.

The Placemaking coordinators will help neighborhoods facilitate and coordinate the outreach/public involvement process, community decision-making and design workshops, and the permit process with the City.

Potential Project Ideas:

•Community gardens •Insectaries and Bee Habitat •Backyard sharing •Gathering spaces •Creative solutions to issues your neighborhood is facing •Benches •Sculptures •Multi-functional spaces •Alternative energies •Murals •Art installations with recycled and reclaimed materials •Depaving •Eco-roofs •Reflective Rooftops •Meditation area •Teahouses •Water catchment systems •Intersection repair •Cob structures •Solar installations •Bioswales •Outdoor classrooms •Mosaic work •Permaculture gardens •Cob saunas •Kiosks •Ecological building •Planterboxes •Straw-bale structures •Memorial •Park repair •Street painting •Community theater •Composting toilets •Inter-organizational community collaborations in new parts of the city •Brownfield bioremediation •Inner-block pathways •Amazing things we have not yet imagined...

How It Works

The Placemaking Committee will work with your community group throughout the spring, culminating in a design for your project, which will be implemented during VBC (late May). We will help neighborhoods facilitate and coordinate the outreach / public involvement process, community decision-making and design workshops, grantwriting, the permit process with the City, and partnership building. Though we will work very closely with you, all site groups are responsible for their projects from start to finish, which includes fundraising, building, publicizing, and ongoing maintenance of the project.

Include as many as possible of the people who might use your “place.” Many successful neighborhood projects begin with a few inspired individuals. The key to any community project, however, is to shift that inspiration to a whole community and involve all of the stakeholders throughout the whole process. We realize that this initial statement of interest will be submitted by those first few inspired individuals, so please do your best to express your own interest and ideas as well as those which you think your neighborhood would appreciate.

We welcome folks who are new to placemaking. Answer the questions below to the best of your ability. Some groups start out further along in the process, and have already connected with possible funders, etc. Where ever you are in the process is fine.

Community sites that begin the season with an open potluck of interested participants generally are much more successful in the long run. For neighborhood projects, this means the folks living in roughly a 2-block radius. For churches or schools, you probably already have a good way to make announcements like this - but we encourage you to reach out to all possible participants. We have a 5-minute video available on our website for you to share, but we suggest that the event be mostly socializing (with a sign up sheet for further involvement). This is a very highly recommended step, as it is so closely tied to the success of your VBC project.

Expected Timeline

Project Proposal Deadline – January 27th, 2012
Please fill out the electronic form (below) or mail to: PO Box 42615, Portland, OR 97242.
Host your initial community potluck: Before the proposal deadline

Inaugural Vision Sharing: February 2nd 2012; 6:30 – 8:30pm (Location TBA)
Groups come together with VBC Organizers for the first time of the season to announce their visions and intentions for the placemaking activities. This will be an open and celebratory potluck where you’ll be able meet other citizen placemakers, natural builders, permaculturists, artists, and potential volunteers.

Preparatory Weekly Placemaking Trainings: Most Thursdays from February through May (Location TBA)
We will be holding training meetings most Thursday nights. We can collaborate with someone from your site by providing them all the information they need to bring back to your site’s regular meetings. We have an introductory packets for site liaisons which will be available by the first meeting on February 2nd.

Community Site Meetings: To be decided by your group
In order to master the placemaking process, we strongly encourage sites to meet weekly, on their own, from February through May. Please pick a consistent time (and ideally place) for these meetings, as consistency in meeting time makes it much more likely that others will remember to attend. We ask that you not meet on Thursday nights. We have an agenda for each week, Feb - May, that is designed to carry you successfully through the placemaking process, and result in just the right project for your site during VBC.

Earthday Progress Expo: TBA
City Repair’s Earthday Celebration usually takes place during the third or fourth Saturday of April. We like to take this time for sites to put together simple displays their placemaking projects to share with everybody. It’s a great time to get feedback, volunteers and encouragement. It’s also a good midway point to assess progress.

Village Building Convergence 12: May 25th – June 3rd, 2012
Each site’s schedule during the week will be their own, but this is the time when volunteers from all over Portland and beyond will be running around the city, excited to help sites accomplish their goals!

If you turned in an application for VBC2012 before the deadline,
Follow up:

At the first meeting, on February 2, 2012, we will need $50 from all applied sites (unless scholorship is applied). Cash or Check is acceptable, but we prefer Check with "VBC [YOUR COMMUNITY SITE NAME]" in the Memo line.

Snail Mail the good'ol'days way to
PO Box 42615, Portland, OR 97242

For either of the following payment options, please be sure to include your community's name.

Questions?
e-mail: vbcplacemaking@cityrepair.org
Contact: Hannah Poirier, Placemaking Coordinator, 541 419 6723

Thank you!