This Week's Reading

This week's reading is from a workbook that's whole focus is to help organizations connect with their surrounding community and learn to utilize whatever assets the community has to offer in order to form strong community-based projects. It lists three main goals, all of which essentially boil down to strengthening both communities and organizations through interaction with one another. After reading this, what I found to be extremely encouraging was how relevant our project is to the goals this workbook pushes organizations to achieve. BLink's whole purpose is to build connections. With BLink, communities, organizations, people, businesses, etc. can all communicate with each other and hopefully combine resources to make everyone more successful in achieving their goals. BLink will foster strong community-based projects. The reading talks about the importance of relationships with local residents, marginalized residents, associations, local economy - the list goes on. And BLink, I would say, provides organizations with the opportunity to strengthen their relationships in every one of those areas. It's cool to see just how important our project is to community organizing. One of the pages in the workbook actually encourages organizations to draw out their own map of connections, complete with existing and potential lines!