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Champaign's Strong Local Communities
Oscar Smith, Publisher May 21, 2021
We at HIP Champaign are becoming increasingly convinced that our strong local Champaign Urbana communities can help solve many of the problems we are currently facing.
When you think about it, most things that people truly care about are local issues. Do we have access to good schools? Is our neighbourhood safe? Do we have access to good stores nearby to do our daily shopping? Are there any facilities, sports clubs, not-for-profit organizations where our kids can go after school?
Making progress toward addressing these issues usually requires a combination of factors. First, some of the local projects need funding. Second, they need a community leader who will take the initiative to find a solution. Our goal as publishers is bring needed awareness within our communities.
Several tools already exist to help our local communities become stronger. Current examples are Nextdoor and Facebook Groups on the social networking side and GoFundMe on the fundraising side. We have been working in collaboration with Realty Newspaper and Illinois Television building opportunities for broadening communications for all the various communities to access.
As Publisher there are a few critical characteristics involved putting everything in place:
- HIP Champaign must develop a strong, frequent use case. This local HIP Champaign publishing tool will only be as successful as the strength of the network, so it is important that we keep local community users coming back on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.
- There is a pent up demand to put local community leaders front and center. If we don’t have strong moderators/curators/community leader and spiritual leaders the whole initiative will likely fail. With that said, we feel that adoption and engagement will be greater with a bottoms-up distribution, as opposed to a top-down approach.
- This HIP Champaign platform needs to make sure that the participants and conversations are truly local and are not getting taken over by people from outside of the local geography. The platform also needs to make sure that the conversations on it stay productive (instead of becoming very aggressive and partisan like with many other social media platforms). Strong community moderation is imperative.
- Being able to fund specific projects (instead of “just” advocating for them) is a very powerful opportunity. I imagine something along the lines of A HIP Champaign Fund Drive with our local businesses with the hope to attract both local funding as well as funding from outside of the community.
- If this platform can serve our local politicians, it would augment its reach.
These are the heartfelt initial thoughts, and we’d love to get any feedback.
ATTN: Oscar Smith, HIP Champaign, Publisher
