As you know, Watershed is facility maintenance for a building for industrial arts production. Watershed 'holds a space' for Tool Shed, which has the following, shared mission with Watershed:

"Social Engineering through the Provision of Infrastructure"

How can we best serve
a) our community or artists, freaks and creatives?
b) the local neighborhood that we are in?
c) other struggling community service agencies?

PUBLIC SERVICE IDEAS.

For the Ballyhoo/June 9th event, I'd like to solicit nominations from the neighborhood for small 'house fixits' and other garden/property improvements that we can do. This would be in the frame of "Xmas in July" -where a bunch of youngsters get together to fix up the homes of elderly and disabled.

-Trash Cleanup - Our big trash cleanup is planned for next week in the Oaks Bottom Park, and we will probably try to hit all of Milwaukie all the way to Yummy Garden and down to the Gingerbread House.
-Public Internet Access - A public space for people to check their email where Butterfly's now is...
-Erosion Control - The plan to beautify the McLoughlin embankment - the nuisance before we came was abated by chopping down all the trees. Now we have to abate THAT nuisance by making it pretty. Erosion control is being looked at by our Green building geeks.
-Building Cleanup - let us not forget the eyesore in which we sit - visible improvements to the outside will go a long way towards improving the entire neighborhood. Looking for volunteers to help us do that - it'll be fun!
-Places for small businesses to meet.
-Places for community service agencies to meet.
-Staging for projects for Burning Man.


SUPPORTING OUTSIDE AGENCIES

For support to other struggling groups, we have a couple of options. One is network services (webhosting), and of course the physical manufacture of support infrastructure (Carties, mobile soundsystems for dance groups like the Sprockettes, Velo Vixens, Spinergy), and the seamstresses in the building are excited about being able to help our friends in theater with costuming and such.

There's the videography layer - that we go help groups tell their story and get their word out so they can succeed in their missions.

And of course Tool Shed itself is designed to serve people in setting up their shops and creative spaces in their homes, as well as shared infrastructure around here.







EVENTS -
The most obvious way that people THINK we can serve them is, of course, events - we've turned down down SO many so far because they in no wise had a public service component. For example, our open house was directly oriented towards 'matchmaking' for small businesses and struggling projects (Aphelion). Two weeks later (last weekend) we were able to return the favor for Spun Academy, a small local nonprofit school. These were good examples of community service, though the Spun one turned out to have a miscalculation in terms of NOISE - we never guessed that we'd be a noise problem across McLoughlin - it's such a huge street that apparently the neighbors over there couldn't sleep. Now that the north section is clean, we can start thinking about construction around here - so far we've just been cleaning the building and restoring it to code. Since the north section of the building will be small studios, etc, we won't have that kind of noise spillover over there again. I was thinking I'd go over there and tell them who we are, and explain that we are here to serve them - it's a little hard to put the egg back in the shell once it is broken, though. I hope that once they know who we are and what we are about, they'll appreciate us as a neighborhood improvement rather than a disimprovement... :)



Coming up, we have the following groups that directly adhere to our public service mission:

The Dragon Party - They've been working together to make a huge chinese dragon - these are the same guys who helped us get rid of those high-wattage plugin flourescents - yay for green building services!

May 5th - Geek Prom! If you don't already know what Free Geek is, I highly recommend you hit freegeek.org - they are THE ossum computer recyclers in Portland, and we are proud to support them in their geekery. Were you a prom queen or did you watch from the side? This is your night! The community video lab they are donating should be online to handle their prom pictures.

June 2nd or June 9th - would be our big "community street fair" - this would be lots and lots of fun things for kids, the Power Tool Races might come down from Seattle to show up their tool geekery, and it is also part of PedalPalooza, which is part of our partnership with Shift 2 Bikes, a City Repair Project.


The Multnomah County Bike Fair (also Shift and PedalPalooza) would like to throw their 'end-of-PedalPalooza' event here - we're not certain if we can work that hard - the two events we've already done (Aphelion and the Spun Graduation party) were exhausting enough!


Throw out all your public service ideas here! This is the chance to make the difference you've been waiting for - throw out your ideas here and we'll try to get on it...

fun with infrastructure!

;-b