Hello FRIAMers, Allison Pinto of Sarasota, Florida here -- I met some of you five years or so ago, while I was working at the Florida Mental Health Institute and immersing myself in all things complexity. I am a child/community psychologist now living in Sarasota, Florida, which is on the west coast of Florida about an hour south of Tampa.
Over the past three years, I have been devoting my combined personal / professional efforts to figuring out what it takes for child / neighborhood / community well-being to emerge optimally, from a child psychology / asset-based community development / complexity perspective -- specifically, here in my home neighborhood of Central-Cocoanut in Sarasota. I am wondering if some of you who are fellow complexity enthusiasts might be interested in helping our neighborhood to model what is happening here. Our neighborhood is .4 square miles -- 16 streets long by 3 street wide. It is 47 blocks and about 2000 people, of whom about 500 are up to age 18, 300 are up to age 10 and 175 are up to age 5. That is a high proportion of kids for Sarasota County, the demographically oldest large county in the United States. It is also a neighborhood that is historically and predominantly Black / African-American, although the proportion of residents who identify as White has increased from 25% to about 40% over the past decade, and the proportion who identify as Latino / Hispanic has increased from 5% to 15%. (The county as a whole is 86% White, 5% Black and 7% Latino/Hispanic.) It is a neighborhood with a high proportion of residents experiencing poverty, too -- in a county that is one of the wealthiest in the state of Florida. There are two phenomena that would be great to get some help modeling, from a complexity perspective. The first is general child/neighborhood well-being. (Understood as the same phenomenon at different scales.) I'm interested in figuring out how to model well-being at the neighborhood scale with kids and fellow neighbors as primary agents, connected through the "just in time" exchange of relevant info and also a process of "attuned responsivity" that makes it possible to co-organize thoughts/feelings/behaviors/physiology, in an environment that is characterized by tangible everyday evidence of nurturance (social and otherwise). The other phenomenon is one our neighborhood is very much dealing with now: the emergence of gentrification. This is currently happening here in mean-spirited and painful ways. Artists and arts patrons from outside the neighborhood, together with the local media, have functionally turned the neighborhood into a stage for a Jerry-Springer-like "community dialogue," at neighbors' expense. The dynamic that seems to be emerging is one in which artists and arts patrons (who in this community are predominantly White and predominantly of mid- to high-income) are "against" residents (who in this neighborhood are predominantly Black, with many also of low-income). (You can read some about this here<http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20120202/ARTICLE/120209889>, here<http://www.thebradentontimes.com/news/2012/04/18/opinion/artistic_censorship_denies_opportunity_for_dialog_and_growth/> , here <http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20120502/COLUMNIST/305029996> and here <http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20120503/ARTICLE/120509862>.) I am most concerned about the negative effects this is likely to have on neighborkids here. I am interested in working together with fellow neighbors to disrupt this dynamic before it becomes any further entrenched, and believe that complexity-informed modeling could be a helpful resource to us as neighbors. The thing is - despite promising to teach myself NetLogo for the past five years (it is still blocked out each morning in my Outlook !), I haven't yet done so, and don't know of any fellow Central-Cocoanut neighbors who are adept when it comes to the modeling of complex systems. So I am wondering if some of you would be interested in working together on this. Please email if this is something you could get into. Thanks, Allison Allison Pinto, Ph.D. Banyan Sprout, Inc. 1226 N. Tamiami Trail Suite 202-6 Sarasota, FL 34236 [email protected] www.banyansprout.com
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