Meeting #14 - Finding the Next Community Project

We look at several areas where we could begin planning our next community-focused project

After some wonderful volunteers showed up last month to help us clean up Dover’s Henry Law Park and paint the benches and observation platform, we are back to looking at some other areas that could be good candidates for another volunteer effort. In today’s newsletter we will discuss several areas that we believe could be improved on. There are still some remaining questions for these projects, so there is no solidified plan of attack just yet, but we are working in that direction.

Though, before we jump into that topic I wanted to remind everyone reading that we will be having a Monday meeting soon and here are the details:

Monday Meeting Details

Monday, October 28th 6:30PM - 8:00PM
Juniper Kitchen in Dover

I spoke with the owner of Juniper Kitchen and she was interested in doing another review of the Dover Downtown Pedestrian and Vehicular Access Improvements Project. We will be looking over printouts of the proposed project and discussing areas where we see opportunity to engage the city to take action sooner or to make changes to the proposed plan. Please join us if this is interesting to you!

Community Project Ideas

We looked at four different areas where our group has observed that there is room for potential action and discussed ideas for what that would look like.

Idea# 1 - Waldron’s Court Furniture

The current furniture at Waldron's Court is lacking in both quantity and quality

This was our most discussed topic because the potential of Waldron’s Court is just waiting to be tapped. At the moment we have a few flimsy tables with even fewer scattered chairs. We considered a potential volunteer effort for constructing affordable furniture to give the court more places to comfortably relax and spend time.

This idea is exciting, but it also has some uncertainty around it because it has been brought to my attention that the city intends to place furniture here sometime next year. I do think there could be some benefits to having temporary furniture here, that could then be moved to another location once more permanent furniture is placed, but I also know that it might not be the best time of the year to do this project since winter would make relaxing outdoors less relaxing.

There are online DIY guides on how to convert wooden pallets into simple furniture that can add seating to a place

Even so, for affordable furniture I saw some ideas online on how to convert pallets into some temporary seating and this could be a cost effective way to see if the community would respond to an investment like this.

Idea #2 - Painting and Cleaning Waldron’s Court Lamp Posts

The lamp posts at Waldron's Court could benefit from a new paint job and cleaning the lamp at the top

This is another project idea at Waldron’s Court which was brought to my attention by Ellen Andrick, the owner of Replenish Refillery. The light posts are tagged with stickers, have peeling paint, and the lamp at the top could be cleaner. This is something that a volunteer group could handle that would make the court look nicer and hopefully brighter at night. The challenges for this project would be that we would want to engage the city to see if they might supply us some paint and if they are comfortable with volunteers doing this type of work since it would require a ladder.

Idea #3 - Cleaning Up Utility Boxes

This utility box is right next to The Children’s Museum and is an eyesore for visitors and residents alike

Utility boxes aren’t pretty to begin with, but they are especially ugly if they have writing all over them and dripping paint stains. The goal here would be simple, to just cover up the box with new paint, but it does come with some challenges. First, these boxes are privately owned by the utility companies and our group would need to get permission from them before anything could be done. Second, how can we discourage future vandalism from taking place? I do think that if we could get permission from the utility companies, then this could be a worthwhile effort.

Idea #4 - Henry Law Park Pavilion Roof Repair

Both of the pavilions at Henry Law Park have roofs that could use some care

These roofs have seen better days! Their poor condition is obvious just from the photos and I wonder how damaged they actually are if you were to inspect closer. The primary challenge here would be the task itself because repairing a roof is a lot of work that is not without risk. I don’t know if this is something that volunteers could do, but maybe we could find a local roofing company that would be interested in repairing these pavilions in exchange for a sponsor plaque or find if there is a way to fundraise for this.

Wrapping Up

These are the projects that we discussed that look like potential candidates for action from our group. There is still planning to be done before we feel confident committing to a project, though. We are trying to apply the Strong Towns Process for taking action in a community:

We are looking at what we have observed and discussing ways to address those issues. When you approach things in this manner and focus on making smaller investments you can take action faster, meet needs sooner, and get results and feedback with less cost.