Roll out the barrel for National Night Out
| August 5, 2009 | 12:56 PM
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Kids smoke up an Englewood neighborhood learning how to use fire extinguishers during National Night Out. (RMI photo by Hank Schultz)
Social scientists have wrangled for years with the question of community fragmentation caused by modern conveniences such as automobiles, cable TV and the Internet. Neighbors don’t know each other, leaving people at a loss where to turn for help in times of need.
What to do about it? One of the answers is a no-brainer. It’s one of the first things you learned in college: Have a party.
Tuesday marked National Night Out, an evening in which neighbors nationwide gathered for block parties. Englewood, a local leader in organizing this event, featured 38 such parties last night, with a few more to come this weekend.
“About a thousand people are participating,” said Toni Geier of the Englewood Police Department, who coordinated the event. The festivities are aimed primarily at promoting public safety. But they’re a lot of fun, too.
“Right now these kids are participating in an emergency preparedness exercise,” said George Sullivan, Neighborhood Watch block captain and host of a party off South Washington Street near Belleview.
“But they don’t know it. They think they’re on a scavenger hunt,” he said as children scurried past a groaning table of food into and out of each other’s homes with their digital cameras, recording the location of fire extinguishers, gas shutoff valves and the like.
Doug Linkhart, a Denver at-large councilman and advocate of block parties, said in a recent forum hosted by the city that knowing your neighbors can make you “happier, healthier and wealthier.”
It might seem counterintuitive, but research cited during the forum shows that neighbors have a disproportionate effect on a person’s happiness, more so even than close family members. If your neighbors are happy, you are more likely to be, too. And mountains of data show that having strong social connections is a big determining factor in overall satisfaction and health.
But wealth? Where does that come in?
“They don’t have to become your best friends,” Linkhart said of neighbors. But these networks of casual acquaintances are the ones most likely to lead to economic opportunities such as a new job, he said.
So, remember that renegade college kegger, the one that gave the resident assistant in your dorm premature gray hair? Subtract the binge drinking, and it turns out you were learning a valuable life lesson after all.
community fragmentation, doug linkhart, national night out, neighbors
