February 16, 2010

If you are part of an NCAA Division II school, finding and spreading the word about your campus “things to do” calendar will go a long way toward extending community.  If you are a student athlete, take it a step further.  Ask the announcers at your next game to announce a few of the non-sports activities coming up soon – show your support for students doing things other than sports.

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Here is an amazingly simple thing you can do to enhance community involvement wherever you are, but at the moment, I am thinking primarily about colleges and high schools.

I had a meeting with some folks at the local newspaper recently.  We were talking about community and the things that people can do.  I honestly thought I had a good handle on the things to do in my area. I was wrong. In less than five minutes just the few people in the meeting told me of about five things going on that day that, had I known earlier, I would have been interested in doing them.

It struck me, there must be a calendar of this stuff somewhere, and if there isn’t, this may be the most obvious need for community.

So two really simple things.  One, take a moment, it won’t take long, to search the Internet to find where “Things to do” in your area are listed. The local newspaper is also a good place to check.  If you are at a college or high school it should be even easier to find out where they keep the calendar of events.  

One of two things will happen.  If you find it, the second simple thing to do is browse it, decide to do some things and tell a few other people about where to find this calendar and suggest they do something.  If you don’t find a calendar I admit this next option is a bit tougher.  Think about how you can motivate others to build the calendar.

As a result of my discussion on this, I’m now going to a Spring Training game with some neighbors AND I discovered a community website wwwilovetheburg.com where more than 10,000 of my neighbors work together to be sure we all know what’s going on.