Dear fellow residents of the City of Bloomington,<\/p>\n
I am one of the people responsible for the influx of hundreds of people to our town during the past week for the Plan-It-X music festival.\u00c2\u00a0 In conversations that I’ve had with residents of our community who were not involved with the planning or who didn’t participate in the fest’s events, the response to the additional people in our town ranged from excitement, to curiosity, to confusion, to frustration.\u00c2\u00a0 Certainly, all the people who attended the performances, workshops, film screenings, and other events associated with the festival were a noticeable addition to the community.\u00c2\u00a0 Our goal of creating an event that was very accessible to attend and which provided a very flexible framework for all the fest’s attendees to spontaneously create performances, learning opportunities, and fun events had a very high impact on the use of public spaces in Bloomington.<\/p>\n
We hope that all the people and their use of these spaces still allowed others to share the spaces and created an exciting, interesting atmosphere for everyone and did not make Bloomington’s excellent parks, the library, or other public spaces inaccessible or uncomfortable to anyone.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, we are aware that a very small group of people who did not participate in most of fest’s activities, but were most likely in town as a result of the fest, created some significant problems for local law enforcement, damaged some of our community spaces, and may have made many in our community, fest organizers included, less comfortable in our town.\u00c2\u00a0 So, for better or for worse, having our event in Bloomington had a very noticeable impact on the city and its residents which, perhaps, was disproportionate to the relevance or participation of the community at large.\u00c2\u00a0 In the context of conversations with community members about some of the more frustrating issues associated with the fest, the question was raised, “what is this event doing FOR Bloomington?”\u00c2\u00a0 This is a valid, important question for us, and really, for anyone planning events in this city, and it is a question that I will now hope to answer.<\/p>\n
The easy answer is that this music festival was planned as a benefit for a number of community organizations.\u00c2\u00a0 In the end, $2,000 was raised for Rhino’s Youth Center, and $3,100 each was raised for Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard and The Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project.\u00c2\u00a0 Beyond the actual dollars raised, though, this event demonstrated how people, with very few resources other than their time, talents, and energy, can use something that they care about personally, in this case independent music and art, to help support their community as a whole.\u00c2\u00a0 Some people support their community through volunteer ism, others financially, others through participation in local politics.\u00c2\u00a0 This festival is a reminder that it is a combination of all those things, and contributions and involvement beyond those traditional forms, that comes through our imagination and inspiration, that makes for a strong, sustainable community.<\/p>\n
Beyond the money raised, or the reminder of what anyone from any background can do for the city of Bloomington, having over 1,000 people visit our city allowed me to see the strengths and assets of our community through the eyes of others.\u00c2\u00a0 Countless fest attendees spoke to me about how they were impressed with Bloomington, and not just in terms of the spaces and organizations associated with the fest.\u00c2\u00a0 They were impressed by the quality and multitude of the shared spaces in our town: the parks, the pools, and the library.\u00c2\u00a0 They were impressed by the tree-lined streets, the maintenance of small-town character even as the community is visibly growing, the number of locally-owned independent businesses, and the network of community groups that allow residents of Bloomington to build and sustain their community and to support other members of their community.\u00c2\u00a0 In addition, those attending the fest, appreciated not only the physical or institutional merits of our community, but the people themselves.\u00c2\u00a0 Many commented on the friendliness by which they were greeted by the locals that they met, and the fairness that they experienced when conflicts did arise.<\/p>\n
Certainly, many events, whether they are other cultural festivals like the Lotus Festival, or conventions and conferences hosted by the convention center or the university, bring visitors to Bloomington, and afford those visitors the opportunity to see the many great things about our community that I have mentioned.\u00c2\u00a0 Many of those events bring numbers of visitors that are far greater than our festival, and with seemingly less impact.\u00c2\u00a0 However, most of these visitors are older, more settled people, who will return from their visit to their own communities and the roles and routines that they have created there.\u00c2\u00a0 The vast majority of the visitors who came to Bloomington for Plan-It-X fest are young people, most of them searching for a definition and model for community.\u00c2\u00a0 We should be proud, as residents of Bloomington, that our community could make such a positive, profound impression on so many youth and that the things we have built, as a community, and our relationships with each other, as a community, may motivate the things that others build and the relationships that others find in the places where they are from.<\/p>\n
The challenges of community are ones that we consistently face, the questions difficult, and the answers complicated.\u00c2\u00a0 They are challenges that raise tensions between neighbors as much as they create a sense of solidarity.\u00c2\u00a0 Ultimately, I appreciate the chance to see my community as others see it, and to be reminded why we continue to rise to the unrelenting challenges of building community and, together, search for those complicated answers to difficult questions.<\/p>\n
Sincerely,
\nGeoffrey Hing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dear fellow residents of the City of Bloomington, I am one of the people responsible for the influx of hundreds of people to our town during the past week for the Plan-It-X music festival.\u00c2\u00a0 In conversations that I’ve had with residents of our community who were not involved with the planning or who didn’t participate… Continue reading An open letter to the city of Bloomington<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wnIz-d0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/806\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}