First Responders For Durham's Community Appearance

The subject of appearance is on the minds of many in Durham, NC these days with the impending removal of trees around billboards here and statewide.  A new law that goes into effect on March 1 will permit billboard owners to clear cut to the ground more than a football field of all trees and shrubs from in front of their signs.

Appearance is a big part of a community's image.  In a recent poll, by a margin of about 4 to 1, Durham residents agreed or strongly agreed that appearance should be a high community priority.

Read on for an interesting piece by DCVB's President Emeritus, Reyn Bowman, on a way that the City of Durham quietly responds to this concern everyday and continues to try and deliver the promise that Durham is where great things happen.

"First Responders For Community Appearance"

Bull City Mutterings

Reyn Bowman

Durham North Carolina's tiny 8-member Rapid Response Impact Team is the hidden force behind much of what is often credited only to neighborhood associations or organizations like Keep Durham Beautiful.

Headed by Durham native, Daryl Hedgspeth, as part of the City’s Neighborhood Services Improvement Department, the Impact Team was responsible in the past calendar year alone for:

• Removing nearly 9000 instances of graffiti and related symbols and scripted words.

• Removing 324 displaced shopping carts that had been driven away from the sites where they belong only to be abandoned and left to junk up roadsides and trails.

• Removing more than 1100 illegal dump sites created by people, both residents and nonresidents who travel to Durham to work, who couldn't be troubled to properly dispose of the refuse.

• Mowing 344 "weedy lots" and cleaning up debris from another 243 sites, nearly 746 tons in all.

In addition, the Impact Team facilitates individual neighborhood cleanup initiatives such as “big sweep” efforts focused on waterways as well as cleanup preparation for, urban gardens, clearing neglected right-of-ways, and dealing with costly-to-remove up huge bills such as paint and hydraulic fluids spills. 

The Impact Team is also most likely the group that quietly distributes and retrieves barricades for parades, fundraising walks and runs, festivals and other community events.  They also supervise a team of two dozen young people over the summer it picked up 9 tons of litter in just eight weeks.

Given the fact that Durham residents gave only two failing grades to their community, including one for inattention to general appearance, the Impact Team’s remarkable effort is one area not yet scaled to the size of the task it faces.

This remarkable group doesn't get the attention it should because to do so would be to draw attention to neglect and raise questions about why community appearance is given such high priority among residents, but receives far too little attention from those in governance.

Residents who mount volunteer cleanup efforts in neighborhoods and along streams and trails or spy graffiti or illegal dumping or weedy lots or debris that are threatening the community’s well-being, including public health and safety, should call or e-mail Durham One Call for assistance but it is likely the Rapid Response Impact Team that they will thank in the end.

A Leap Forward For Intra-Neighborhood Communication

Part of what makes Durham a great place to live is its strong neighborhoods, whose residents epitomize so many of Durham's brand values.  Durham residents are caring, activist in nature, passionate about where they live, unpretentious, and community-spirited.

DCVB has always had an interest in neighborhood communications because residents make Durham such an inviting place for visitors; they are the ones on the street helping people locate landmarks, giving people directions, or just offering smiles, nods and cheery good mornings.  With about 80% of executives who are looking to relocate their businesses also experiencing Durham first as a visitor, the neighborhood experience is one of high importance.  

This blog, written by Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau President Emeritus and Durham blogger Reyn Bowman, showcases a new intra-neighborhood communication tool.  The entrepreneur (another one of Durham's brand values) who created it was a former owner of one of Durham's celebrated cuisine restaurants (Guglhupf).  He made contact with DCVB to get assistance weaving Durham's overarching brand into the new site.  Take a look and see if your neighborhood has its website set up.  If not, submit it!

Leap Forward For Intra-Neighborhood Communication
Bull City Mutterings
Reyn Bowman

Durham entrepreneur Hartmut Jahn has created the next generation in neighbor-to-neighbor or intra-neighborhood communication. Years ago Durham neighborhoods jumped on listservs as a way to communicate but now Neighborship takes listservs to a new level.

The new platform offers everything a listserv does and so much more including:

• A website for each participating neighborhood

• The option of a personal inbox and a method of sending emails for each participant

• A chat option in addition to email or digests for quicker exchanges

• A way to enlist and post recommendations for vendors and service providers

• A means to communicate alerts or information to immediate neighbors rather than the entire neighborhood

• The ability to get immediate notifications or digests of exchanges

• The ability to post announcements or events that hopefully will soon tie directly into the Durham Community Calendar maintained by DCVB.

• A map of the area covered by each neighborhood etc.

For an example of a neighborhood page, I’ve put a snippet of my Rockwood Neighborhood page as an image in this blog. You should be able to click on it to enlarge. Other neighborhoods will be visible after registration.

To register to use Neighborship, click here. To request that your neighborhood be added to the drop-down, email help@neighborship.com.

I haven’t heard back yet from the administrator for my Rockwood listserv but I know the emails can be pre-loaded to any neighborhood added to Neighborship to make the transition easier. Understandably, although ironically, some neighborhood that that were early-adopters of listservs may feel some reticence, even inertia when it comes to change.

That’s natural but the new platform is a great leap forward and Neighborship is rolling out to communities across the nation making it yet another reason to believe Durham is indeed where great things happen!

Communities – Unpretentious or Narcissistic

Durham blogger and President Emeritus of the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau shares his thoughts on the Durham's core traits and values...


"Communities - Unpretentious or Narcissistic"
Bull City Mutterings
Reyn Bowman

“Unpretentious” has been distilled by experts as one of Durham, North Carolina’s core traits and values as a community and scientifically confirmed among both internal and external audiences.

Far more than any physical attributes, personality traits such as these are by far the most emblematic of a community’s distinctive character.

Some outsiders have trouble rationalizing Durham’s unpretentiousness with its unheard of 17 to 1 community pride ratio among residents, or the fact that among non-residents it scores the highest positive image compared to similarly sized or larger communities in North Carolina based on scientific surveys.

They probably mistake unpretentiousness as weakness just as many people do humility, and just as they may also mistake the boosterish façade of some communities as a reflection of pride or image.

The following description of humility is useful for two reasons.  It comes from another blog by David Brooks and paraphrases comments made by Dr. June Tangney of George Mason University during a panel discussion at the recent convention of the Association for Psychological Science.

"Humility is better seen as the opposite of narcissism. The narcissist has a damaged sense of self and is consequently self-centered a great deal of the time, reacting in defensive ways to ego threat. 

The humble person has an accurate and durable sense of self and can see the relationship between the self and the larger world."

Not only does that summary provide a good understanding of humility but it describes why so many narcissistic communities can be so over-reaching and then when unmasked, so defensive, dismissive and condescending.

Just as Durham is unpretentious by nature, other communities can also be narcissistic by nature.  The role of community/destination marketing executives as stewards for protecting and defending a community’s identity against the overreaching and condescension of others is made all the more difficult especially if the news media based in those communities are complicit in this narcissism.

It takes “grit: the perseverance and passion for long-term goals” to stand up for a community in the face of these reactions from another and still nurture and sustain inter-community working relationships and partnerships.  But just remember that any true partnership is founded on mutual respect.

It is also extremely important in the face of a narcissistic reactions by other communities to resist, without fail, any temptation to retaliate in a way that is zero-sum or win-lose. It helps to keep in mind that a narcissistic community reacts with dismissiveness and hostility because deep down it has an almost temporal insecurity.

There will always be individuals in otherwise narcissistic communities who, while they may not know how to overcome that overall trait there, have a more realistic, durable and humble sense of their community and are willing to work together to counterbalance its narcissism.

If you live and work in a community that is inherently unpretentious and humble, not just a “wannabe”, then these explanations are resonating.  If you read this far but are dismissive, then you’re probably part of the problem…and so is your community.

If you didn’t realize that defending and protecting a community’s identity is the most basic and elemental aspect of community marketing, now you do.

Localism Index Signals Return of Local, Independent Businesses

No stranger to the buy local mentality, Durham has always been a community committed to support the growth and development on its independent businesses.

"Localism Index Signals Return of Local, Independent Businesses"
Bull City Mutterings
Reyn Bowman

Below is a graphic illustrating reasons to be optimistic that “localism” is on the rebound. It has appeared in both Harpers and The Nation.

To stay abreast of this movement, click here to subscribe to The Hometown Advantage Bulletin eNews published by The New Rules Project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

“A Change Is Gonna Come”– A Durham Inspiration!

The Durham story continues to fascinate with every new detail uncovered.  Read below about a how a hit from the '60s was inspired by a visit to Durham.

“A Change Is Gonna Come”– A Durham Inspiration!
Bull City Mutterings
Reyn Bowman

The words to this song have always resonated with me and I’ve learned recently that the writing of this song was inspired in part in my adopted home town, Durham, North Carolina.

Sam Cooke played a concert here in May of 1963. After his performance, he stopped to talk to some Civil Rights activists and sit-in demonstrators here. After talking to them, he returned to his bus and penned the first draft of this song and then tucked it into his notebook.

Mr. Cooke recorded it in the final weeks of that year but it wasn’t prevalently released until after his death in 1964. It became an anthem for the Civil Right Movement of the 1960s.

Sam Cooke, for many of my generation, was our introduction to Soul music and a much more diverse world than where we grew up.

Courtesy of YouTube, below are videos of Sam Cooke’s version, followed by a contemporary version by Seal:

Tourism Factor In #11 Best Place For Business

See DCVB's President Emeritus Reyn Bowman's blog below for a rather focused look behind a ranking and learn a bit more about why Durham is now being included on some lists it had never graced previously.  It is also important to note that rankings such as these are using the word "city" to refer to Metropolitan Statisical Areas which is an improper reference.  Follow the link to see the US Census' definition to learn more.

Tourism Factor In #11 Best Place For Business
Bull City Mutterings
Reyn Bowman

Because it crossed the 500,000 mark in population, the Durham NC MSA is included for the first time in the MarketWatch “best of” measures.

Also new this year in the “best places for business” methodology are new and improved metrics for tourism just released this month and signaling the growing influence of visitor centric economic and cultural development for communities.

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A Typical Case of “Community” Identity Theft

On a normal day marketing is merely a multi-faceted and highly complex process.  Other days, however, it's an all-out scramble to keep alot of balls in the air. 

What follows is a post about a major aspect of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau's work.  It's typically referred to as "defending the brand."  Sometimes it seems the effort is akin to whispering in a hurricane or asking a mouse to pull a freight train.  But delivered consistently, week after week, year after year, the efforts do pay off.  Here is a blog post written by DCVB's President Emeritus, considered an expert in community image and brand.

A Typical Case of "Community" Identity TheftBull City Mutterings
Reyn Bowman

If you ever wonder why “36 Hours” in the NYTs tried to cover Durham as part of two huge metro areas lumped together (an impossibility by the way) but gave tiny Sun Valley in the center of my homestate of Idaho an issue all its own, look no further than this announcement related to the funeral of Elizabeth Edwards, R.I.P.

It is information like this, distributed either directly by Raleigh-based WRAL to publications like USA Today and others or relayed via the Raleigh-based office of Associated Press for North Carolina that pollutes and distorts, some say deliberately, Durham’s identity.

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A Local Perspective on Burgers

One of the purposes of the Durham News Service is to help tell Durham’s Story. In fact, this site is ground-breaking in the destination marketing business for real-time news service delivery. Part of great story telling is taking from the organic truth of the place you are promoting. Fortunately, in Durham there are hundreds of outstanding bloggers telling their truths about this place. Their stories will appear here, too, and with increasing frequency.

The piece that follows is a great exploration of burgers from one person’s point of view. Food is one of Durham’s most distinctive features, strongly held opinions about that subject and honesty are others. This posting embodies all three.

My Choice For Best New Durham Burger!
Bull City Mutterings
Reyn Bowman

I love hamburgers, always have, so people have been asking me to rate two new Durham locations (as a benchmark, I included a highly regarded Raleigh outlet with a Durham location.)

Over the course of several weeks, I’ve tried the doubles at King’s Sandwich Shop in the Downtown Foster-Geer District, Only Burger (both the famed food truck and the newly opened stand in Hope Valley) and to be fair to nearby Raleigh, its famed Char-Grill and to be ultra fair, both at its Durham location and at the original location.
 
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