I find myself at the center of local change throughout my life. Recently, I led a campaign to make my son's middle school accessible for people who wheelchairs. Now my boy is the first student who uses a wheelchair to attend this school in its 111-year history. That's this year. Back in my college days I led a group of students who pushed our 36,000-student university to adopt an environmental purchasing policy, and we watched the first truckload of recycled-content paper arrive at the loading dock on the day before our graduation. And there have been many great "changemaking" in the years in between. What else is there to life but to try to make a positive difference in our world?
I love Burlington, Vermont, my adopted home. My wife and I moved here without jobs or connections 15 years ago, and now we find ourselves with the richest community life of anyone we know, full of children, and connection, and social innovation, and struggle. We find meaning in making our place the best it can be for everyone (working on education, community-supported agriculture, alternative transportation, new energy solutions, addressing poverty, healthcare and housing issues, disability and accessibility projects and more). And then we reach out to both learn from and share with other communities around the world.
My strongest passions lie in reviving the dying art of building vibrant local community in towns and neighborhoods across North America. Most of us in the United States no longer know our neighbors, and this comes with a steep cost. For people who aren't connected to place and the people they share that place with make poor stewards... of both their local and global responsibilities. We find that people who are rooted in their community bring great common sense and vitality to their locale AND to larger national and global socio-political issues.
Michael Wood-Lewis has been pulling neighbors together into community since his Indiana childhood spent organizing ball games and visiting neighbors on his evening paper route. Decades later, he founded Front Porch Forum, which hosts a pilot network of 100s online neighborhood forums that blankets one-third of Vermont. Nearly 30,000 households subscribe, including more than half of the households in urban and rural areas. The resulting news sharing and community building is attracting recognition from Knight News Challenge, PBS MediaShift, the Vermont legislature, the Rural Telecom Congress, and the Case Foundation and Orton Family Foundations. Previously, he led an innovative trade association of New England utilities. Earlier, he guided a DC-based consortium of U.S. municipal leaders in developing environmental technologies, building on his experience as an inventor of high-tech recycling equipment. He earned an MS in engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as an MBA.
