Choose To Hope

Today was an outstanding day. It wasn't anything specific that made it such, but overall it really was quite good. This week had me feeling a little overwhelmed Monday morning when my alarm went off because I was either facilitating a meeting or hosting a major event every day through Thursday and then flying across the country on Friday. Add into the mix that I needed to get my house under control while at the same time not having the flexibility of taking any time off work because of the meetings. Monday's meeting went well, and I didn't need to pull out any of the facilitation skills that I don't really even know if I have (it's kind of like CPR, you learn how to do it and hope you never really need to use it because you aren't sure if you're going to remember how, and even if you remember how if you are going to be good at it).

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were events that have been in the works for 2 years but because of construction delays are just now being held. We are holding these events to show engineers, developers and planners what went into producing a development that uses low impact development practices rather than 'business as usual' development practices (which are clearly not working well for the environment, or society as a whole). There are a lot of partners, but since my program is the main host I end up with the 'what do we do now' questions if something doesn't work as planned. Yesterday went swimmingly with nothing out of the ordinary, most of the registrants showing up, lunches on time, no rain for the site visit, and good reviews from both the speakers and people leaving the event. Since today and tomorrow are a replay of yesterday with the only change being the 25 people taking the workshop, I was feeling pretty good. Add in that between Monday and Tuesday night I cleaned the house, and did one work related item that needed to be finished this week outside of the meetings. Tonight after I finish this I've got the other work related item that needs to be finished before the end of the week, and then tomorrow I need to pack. Being that those are reasonable items to finish each night in addition to making dinner and cleaning up afterwards I feel much less in an internal panic than Monday morning at 6am.

So, today, once we again had most of the registrants show up (For some reason you can always count on about 10% of the people not showing up. Nevermind you are giving them a free lunch, the course is free, you've made it clear to them there are people on the waiting list and you've confirmed with them that they are attending. Apparently there are 10% of any meeting group that just want to be jerks.), lunch was great, no rain in sight, and we were receiving rave reviews. Our training is on the low impact development practices that are being used in the Oak Terrace Preserve, so obviously our site visit was to that site. It is pretty awesome, and if I had an extra $200,000 I would totally be living there. Unfortunately I don't, because it's a really cool neighborhood. The project is one portion of a greater effort by the Noisette Company, which in itself is a really inspiring effort to renew the original area that made up the City of North Charleston. It is headed up by the same guy who headed up the Baltimore Harbor renewal, who by the way is an incredible speaker (I love speakers who you can tell really believe in what they are talking about).

We provided vans to drive the people from the area we gave presentations to the development site, and on the way back to the meeting spot we drove through two more redevelopment areas in the works. Mixon and Horizon. Mixon is super high density housing that is set up to mimic old cities like Florence, Italy. It's not really my thing, but it's definitely cool and I like that developers are finally providing alternatives in new housing rather than the same old clear-cut, tract housing where you have to count the homes down the street to figure out which one is yours. Horizon is being done by the housing authority, but you would never know it by looking at it. You definitely think of broken down, low quality homes when you think of government housing, but these are beautiful. They have a mixture of to rent and to own, both government subsidized and non subsidized in the same development. The theory is that people can rent in government subsidized housing, then when they get on their feet buy a place in the same development where they have made relationships and built a life. It was inspiring to see developers who are trying to walk the talk of improving their community, rather than just coming into an area, making as much money as they can and getting out. Perhaps it was necessary to actually drive through and have one of the project managers explain things to you, but I personally was excited to be even a tiny part of the whole thing.

So, my overall comment to all my faithful blog readers, which I came to as we finished our drive down the redeveloped section of the old Navy Base - choose to be a positive change in your little part of the world rather than just existing. Everyone has a little part to play and you can either choose to be status quo, or you can choose to hope for something better and do what you can to get there. A little deep for 9:15 in the evening when I need to spend the next hour making a presentation on performance measures, but it's good to be reminded of what's important in life every once in a while!

this is one of the houses in Oak Terrace, seriously how cute is that!