Similar Places, Different People

I haven’t been to more than a handful of countries.  I’m only fluent in one language. My passport expired with an admittedly pitiful number of stamps.

But I have traveled enough to notice a lot of similarities shared by places halfway around the world. For example one of the first thoughts that popped up when I stepped out of the airport in Israel was “Wow, this looks surprisingly like California.” And in Austin, a city where you can find so many varieties of trees not normally together in one place – cacti, palms, maples, and firs, I often find myself coming around a corner and thinking “Huh, this is a lot like what _____ must look like”

The theory I’m purporting and the question I’m about to pose is that if similarly looking and feeling places around the world exist regardless of the nation or community neighborhood they exist in, then shouldn’t you be able to find community anywhere and define it by the people you’re with? Essentially, if a community can be defined geographically by location and if unique culture is what makes each community special, then the people themselves are what makes community tick.

Obviously we need people to create the culture and settle a community in a location, and while in many cases those communities become very similar in look and feel, it’s only the people there that can truly differentiate and create a sense of community you feel connected to and want to go back to. Imagine how being in a familiar place would be a completely different experience if it looked exactly the same but was populated by a totally different population of people.

Don’t buy it? Here are a few photos from very different places.  While they might look similar, these are places we wouldn’t naturally associate being comparable at all because the image in our heads – based on the types of people and subsequent cultures in each area – make each place seem much less alike than they might otherwise be if not for the people.  Point in case, can you tell me where these below photos were taken?

Which one was taken in Israel and which is from California?

 

 

 

 

 

Which is San Antonio?  Venice?

The Incredible Energy of Startup Cultures

Startup. It’s a word that has many different meanings to many different people. A word that is synonymous with other words like “entrepreneur”, “enterprising”, “co-working”, and “venture capital”, among others.

While all these other buzzwords are being thrown around, there’s one word interlaced among them all: energy. There is an energy surrounding those entrepreneurs, who share energy when they co-work with other entrepreneurs to create game-changing (yes, another buzzword) products and applications that will energize venture capital companies during a seed funding presentation.

That energy that encompasses these co-working spaces filled with entrepreneurs who put their entire lives on hold to create what they hope to be disruptive startup companies is the same energy that permeates out to the cities that play host to these entrepreneurs. We hear of the energy in Harvard dorm rooms, Silicon Valley, and new startup cultures in Austin and Seattle, along with international startup hubs like London and Tel Aviv.

But there’s one city experiencing it’s own startup revolution. One that doesn’t dominate the Mashable or TechCrunch airwaves.

That city is Detroit. The same city known for its innovation relating to the automobile industry at the turn of the 20^th century is also one where that same blue-collar mentality is permeating itself in the downtown startup culture.

Detroit is not Silicon Valley, the “it” place built on the ever growing world of tech startups- some which produced an ungodly amount of success (re: Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard, Twitter, etc) and many that failed miserably. Detroit is an old Midwestern city that since 1960 has lost more than half of its population (according to the 2010 US Census) but has experienced a revival of sorts, with businessmen looking to revive the local downtown scene by moving their business from the suburbs, and non-profits engaging in creative outreach to areas such as civil rights, the environment, and young professional engagement.

Take one startup in particular: CommunityNext. It’s an organization sponsored by a longstanding Detroit institution, the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, and is designed as a way to keep young Jewish adults in Detroit.  While the young adult vibe is present in Royal Oak and Huntington Woods, among other metro Detroit enclaves, CommunityNext works with budding entrepreneurs to offer them subsidized housing in downtown Detroit IF their company/product is one that is a grassroots initiative promoting social change for the city of Detroit.

Think of what  a $500-$3,000 does for a budding entrepreneur. Think of what a housing subsidy does for someone who puts their life on hold to find a way to promote social innovation and change in the place that they grew up. Think of how that same housing subsidy could attract another socialpreneur, who might live in Silicon Valley, but desire to move to a place where he or she can have a greater hand in initiating social change.

This type of action creates that same community of energy present in Austin, Boston and Tel Aviv. However, the startup buzzword that epitomizes Detroit isn’t necessarily ‘growth’. It’s ‘revitalization’. Connecting the old and the new. Putting the “motor” back in “Motor City”.

The Spirit of Community

The world is full of communities large and small that bring life. Some are family or friends. Some form around cities or nations, and others form around tables and fireplaces. Communities keep us together, giving us all a place to sit and share our dreams. We create a bond of community with one another in any way we can – sometimes it’s these little things that bring us together to flourish in times of trouble.  Whether as co-workers, friends, or even as neighbors, what we share as a community is invaluable.

This is especially evident in this time of the year, with the holiday season upon us. All around, we hear of families coming together, sharing, and giving to others out of goodness of their hearts, and goodness to their communities. Whether it’s Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or any other holiday you choose to celebrate, the spirit of community unites us.

Personally, I love my family’s traditions for this time of year, and I feel like they truly bring us together as a community. We organize a large-scale Secret Santa-style operation, only with mysterious “brown bag gifts” that we must make or give from our own collections. In the past, I have received precious family heirlooms, poems and works of art, and of course a large number of useless novelty items that have been passed around the country for years and years. It’s always an exciting surprise to see who will get the singing reindeer lowrider, the zebra-print snuggie, or the ever-popular “box full of love”, which is of course just an empty box. These may seem like insulting gifts, but it really is an honor to have any of them for a year.

But our family traditions don’t just end with our own community. The holiday season has also always been about helping the less fortunate, and my father and I, along with several family friends, volunteer to play music at a local homeless shelter to entertain them as they eat the potluck Christmas lunch that we help to donate and prepare. It is fun, heartwarming, and heartbreaking at the same time to be able to help these people by sharing a little of our community with them. Though it may not be much, we try to do what we can and the only payment I could ever ask for is to see the looks of joy and gratitude on their faces. It’s in these moments when I realize what the spirit of community and giving can do for you. Over the years, it has certainly become a humbling and powerful experience for me.

At OurPangea, we want to invite you to bring your community to us, and we’ll share ours with you. Whether it’s your thoughts, your jokes and gifts, or your help and time, our communities provide us the framework to enrich our lives and the lives of others. So in the spirit of this season, we invite you to give – to share, with us and each other. Share with us some of your holiday traditions, some of your hopes, aspirations, and dreams, so that our community may become stronger for now and the future.

Using OurPangea Within Our Universities & Educational Departments

Universities are society’s greatest resource and crowning achievement. They are at the center of cultivating and crafting knowledge, philosophy, research, health, and art. Most importantly, though, they are hubs of community, sparkplugs of innovation, and the vibrant center of thousands upon millions of lives, ideas, and creations. It is for this reason that OurPangea decided to begin its groundwork mission here, at the University of Texas. UT’s own slogan states it plainly: “What starts here changes the world.” This message could also apply just as easily to the concept of any university – a strong, cohesive community of like-minded and similar individuals dedicated to learning and broadening their perspective of the world. Additionally, each university community consists of dozens of sub-groups in the form of student clubs, fraternities, sports teams, classes, and even personal social circles. In short, a university is the perfect place to kickstart a new initiative connecting these communities and helping them grow. To fully document and present all the possible communities within a university could take lifetimes! But for now, we will explore some of the more immediate and relevant ideas OurPangea is currently exploring alongside dedicated members of university communities to impact the future of education.

In the real world, any community is inherently the sum of its parts – What happens within each community defines what it truly is. Using the above example, sub-groups within a college or university interact and those interactions combine to form how the greater community is perceived.  On a smaller scale, the students within each group are the lifeblood of the entire community of learning and living. Students create and define university culture. Groups of students within residence halls, within majors, or within clubs and groups all create their own communities in the context of the larger university community. A University would benefit from every students interaction because everything will impact what their greater community ‘is.’  And students using OurPangea have the power to shape what their community looks like easily through their day to day interactions.

In a practical sense, OurPangea might be a professor’s greatest tool. The system allows a teacher to create a group for each of his classes and facilitate discussions outside of the classroom. OurPangea would also lead to greater class cohesion to help break down barriers between students and create that unified class community, bridging together perspectives from wide-ranging student groups and individuals alike.

When the scale goes up to the level of an entire university, all the smaller community organization really starts to culminate. OurPangea allows for universities to construct their own identities, using both the “big picture” and every tiny detail that comprises them. A university would express its large-scale goals with it, down to each department and how that department is contributing to the university. From there, departments could construct their goals for each individual professor, class, and student. The university would be able to create the identity online it truly is in real life, and manage community groups, large and small. Using this, alumni could look back and interact with the university, or prospective students could explore as if being a new member of the community. The unique interactions of the professors and students contribute directly to what makes each class, each department, and each university unique, and this will be reflected in the communities that they build together through OurPangea.