Today is "New Member Monday" over on the Get to NoMi Facebook page, so if you haven't yet joined in, now's your chance to see what the buzz is all about. And the page has been buzzing quite a bit lately. Shortly after the tragic shooting death of Terrell Mayes Jr, a community brainstorming session was organized by several NoMi residents and announced on the eponymous page. The event went quite well overall, with everyone treating each other with civility and respect while we came up with as many ideas as possible to combat the problems that led to an innocent child losing his life to gun violence.
Up until the event was posted, Get to NoMi had primarily been used as a forum to promote real estate sales, local businesses, and an overall feel-good sentiment of north Minneapolis. In other words, at least from my perspective, it was boring milquetoast. I rarely checked the page, and usually when I did it was to reset a huge number of Facebook notifications. Maybe the page had its uses, but I didn't find much value there.
Since the brainstorming session, subscribers to the page have increased by several hundred and now over 1,400 "like" this part of Facebook. We started to talk about why it was that there was a much higher representation of people of color and renters at the vigil, but the brainstorming session was made up mostly of white homeowners. That kind of question is essential to tackle if we're going to do a better job of engaging everyone, but too often when we try to discuss it somebody says something that offends someone else and before you know it...
