Troy Community Works!

TCW is looking for a few good volunteers who wish to get their hands dirty in order to make our building cleaner!  We’d like to get a small group together this Saturday, April 9th from 9am – 12pm to join our Development Committee & Outreach Committee in some cleaning and brainstorming.  The cleaning responsibilities will entail sweeping, mopping, and shop vac’ing the interior of the building and marking off some potential dangerous areas as “contractor only.”    All volunteers will be provided with cleaning & safety equipment as well as coffee & cold drinks (served outside the building).

For the brainstorming part, we’d like your input on this summer’s Green Gala!  What’s the  Green Gala?  Only the best party to be held in Troy this summer.  We’re reusing this building and we’d like to invite the community to celebrate with us.  Our outreach committee is in the planning stages of this event (tentatively to be held on June 25th from 8-11pm), but we’d love more input too.  The current concept includes celebrating the reuse of this building by YOU reusing an outfit from your closet.  Got an old bridesmaids’ dress or just can’t part with those 80s white jeans?  Bring ‘em out of the closet and to the gala.   We’ll have the event catered with DJ or band as well as some opportunities to make your mark on the building (literally!).  This Saturday the committee will be going through the building with an eye to plan the event, so please come out & add your thoughts.

If you would like to volunteer, please email Martha Harris at mharris@troycommunity.com.  We would like to get a good accounting of numbers.  If you can’t volunteer this Saturday, please stay tuned for more opportunities to be involved in our 221 E. Main St. project.

Like most people these days I subscribe to several e-newsletters and blogs.  Every so often one of them stands out.  Joseph Grenny and the other authors of the books Crucial Conversations and Influencer have a weekly Q & A where individuals can submit a question on how to deal with a sticky issue.  I’d like to reprint their advice here on how to deal with a difficult neighbor.  I think it is something all of us have experienced at one time or another. The answer deals with a homeowner living in a community with restricted covenants, but I think the advice regarding relationship building and being politely direct is valuable no matter where you live.

Dear Crucial Skills,

I live in a very nice, quiet, upscale suburban neighborhood. A new family recently moved into one of the homes and is doing some things that distract from the value of the neighborhood. We have covenants that restrict what is permitted, but enforcing them could be difficult and possibly costly. How can I approach my neighbors personally and express my concerns without making an enemy out of them?

Sincerely,
Not in My Backyard

Dear Backyard,

This will be the shortest answer I’ve ever written. Not because the issue isn’t crucial, but because your options are limited. I say this because I feel your pain!

With that said, here’s how I would approach this situation.

Talk to the right person. If you have a Home Owner’s Association, the association should inform your neighbor of the rules and the penalties for breaking these rules. They should then hold your neighbor accountable. If they aren’t doing this, your conversation should be with the association.

Do your research. You mentioned that your community has covenants, but you need to be sure the covenants are in force. Just because they are in the original neighborhood documents doesn’t mean they’ve been enforced over time. And if they have not been enforced, they may have no legal validity today.

Build the relationship first. If possible, you should build a relationship with your neighbor before you confront him or her about his or her distracting behavior. If your first conversation with the neighbor is about his or her transgression, it will be harder to create safety. To the degree you can help your neighbor unpack boxes, mow his or her lawn, or provide any other kind of assistance, he or she will be less likely to hear your concerns as attacks and characterize you as an enemy and more likely to actually change his or her behavior.

Be direct and polite. If there is no enforcement body and it’s up to you to speak up, then do so. But work on your story first. See them as reasonable people with different habits and perhaps no understanding of your covenants. Do whatever it takes to feel respectful and caring toward them before opening your mouth. Be friendly and polite, but don’t water down your message. If your bottom line is that this is a rule and they have to follow it, say that. For example, “Hey Pat, there’s a goofy thing in our covenants that you may not know about. Trust me, this isn’t a persnickety neighborhood and we’re glad you’re here, but I thought I should let you know before you get too settled so you’ll know how to address it . . .”

Finally, you should decide if this is important enough to you to deal with legally should they refuse to comply—or whether after your attempt at a crucial conversation you prefer to let it slide.

Good luck with your conversation. I’d tell you about mine but I worry about 140,000 of my closest friends finding out!

Joseph

Thank you to Joseph and all of the others who work on the Vital Smarts books and websites.  If you’d like to see more of their work, please go to www.vitalsmarts.com.

I love to send letters.  The act of finding a card or a nice bit of stationary and marking on them the happenings of my life to an old friend is a little pleasure of mine.  And I’m not talking about the “I-found-a-funny-card-and-signed-it” type of letters.  I mean handwritten, more than one paragraph, sincere letters.  I have always loved to write letters, but it was only recently that I thought about why.

The main reason is to keep in touch-think about all the phases of your life and how often you might have moved around; high school, college, first jobs, internships, getting married, moving away.  Or you have family spread across the country/world and want to stay close.  All these provide opportunities to keep in touch with people you used to see regularly.    A second reason I love to write letters is the joy finding a good old fashioned letter in your mailbox brings.  For example, I sent my friend Amy a postcard and she gushed about it on her blog [click here for a link to No Car Go, her blog about car free living].  Third,  letters mark a point in time.  Recently, two friends found old letters of mine documenting my nervousness about starting grad school and holiday cookie baking.  What memories! You can’t live in the past, but it is good to remember where you were and how you have grown. Letters remind us of that.   Fourth, letters build community.  All the above reasons do too, but letters strengthen our ties to each other.  In this era of facebook and twitter accounts, 24 hour news cycles, and the ubiquitous cell phone nothing quite connects us like a letter.  This point was made recently on the BBC World Service during a piece about how important real letters are to soldiers serving away from home.   Emails and phone calls are great, but there is something about the permanence of a letter.

I recently came across the following quotation from Jane Howard.  “Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family.  Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.”  I say we need them all-a clan, a network, a family.  Each of those words mean something different, but they are ways we connect with each other.  Letter writing can bind us together in ways that other means of communication can not.

Finally, the art of letter writing slows us down and provides a calming way to put your thoughts on paper.  In a recent edition of her blog, GOOP, Gwyneth Paltrow discusses the idea of having an “Electronic Sundown” or a designated time in the evening to turn off the computer, phone, TV and relax by communing with a good book or writing a letter.  I heartily agree.    In writing a letter you can take that time for yourself and build up your relationships with friends and family.  So please, stop reading this computer screen & go find yourself a pen and some paper.  And I always welcome letters in my mailbox!