Have you ever thought about getting more involved in your neighborhood?

May is Get Involved Month

Every year, the Greenwood Community Council looks for new board members and volunteers, and we could use your help now! There is a lot going on in Seattle and it’s hard to keep up. We are an all-volunteer group focused on helping Greenwood residents and businesses get involved in the neighborhood, and to make sure the Greenwood community has a vision and a voice. 

We provide:
  – Face to face dialogue to counter divisiveness and find compromises
  – Opportunities to talk directly with people shaping Greenwood
  – An open forum for all perspectives
  – Information and resources to get involved in the community

And most of the time we have a good time doing it – join us!
We are looking for people interested in chipping in:
  – Monitoring key issues affecting the neighborhood
  – Creating a better website, with news, information and resources
  – Writing for the new opinion blog we’re thinking about
  – Helping plan meetings on current topics
  – Joining our board, where we have openings now

If you’re at all interested, please check out our volunteer page to see some of the things we’d like help with and learn how to get involved.  While you’re there, take a look around our newly redesigned website and you’ll see there are many pages and resources missing – another example of something you could help with. And if you have any interest in joining our board we’d particularly like to hear from you. We’ll schedule a time to meet and discuss your thoughts and interests over a beverage of your choice. Please give it some thought – there’s a lot going on!

I’ve had comments already from people having trouble linking to the survey monkey page from the email they received on “GCC Looking for Help in Community Engagement.”  There are two problems, one of which I need help to fix. 

In the meantime, let’s try a more direct approach I hope you’ll try.  The survey is located at this address (if it doesn’t show up as a link, you’ll need to copy/paste into your browser):  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Y6YGSPJ 

You can also go to the website (where this message will also be posted) and follow links from there.  Links from the website are working fine; it’s only links from mail messages that are not.  The website is located at https://greenwoodcommunitycouncil.org

In case you’re wondering what’s wrong, there are two problems.  One is that people who follow the link from the mail message are getting a page of error messages in their browser.  This seems to be happening all of a sudden for all links from GCC email, including the “manage your subscriptions” link.  This looks like a website database problem that I’ll need help to fix.

The other problem some people are having is that links in community council email messages link to the GCC website, which then redirects to the website the link points to.  Some people’s browsers give them a message in this case warning of spam.  It isn’t, but I will look into whether there’s another way to embed links.

Sorry (and embarrassed) about the inconvenience!

The Greenwood Community Council exists to facilitate and amplify neighborhood involvement and engagement.  I always have a slightly different answer when asked my personal opinion about what the Greenwood Community Council does, but this week I’m thinking we’re about place-making and community-building – which often involves dialogue and advocacy with the city and developers.  

Ultimately we’re effective only to the extent that we engage all sorts of people and understand the many perspectives among our neighbors. And here’s a surprise — most people don’t like meetings!  Face-to-face dialogue is still important and far more conducive to dialogue, learning and solutions than polarized, anonymous blog comments – but we also need to break out of the meeting paradigm and find other ways to engage people in the way they’re most comfortable, and to reach people whose voices may be neglected.  

To that end, we are looking for people who are interested in helping to engage the community more broadly than we can through traditional meetings.  If you’re interested, please take a few minutes to fill out this surveymonkey survey.