Third Sector Connector Blog

I woke up thinking about Tinker Toys this morning. Those little wheels, spokes, connectors, and green fans were “the bomb.”  Often, my sister and  I would build fully-loaded little farms complete with animals, trucks, windmills, and barns. Or sometimes we created huge cellular-looking blobs with random hubs and spokes, together sculpting a funky abstract nexus of modern art.   Whatever emerged from our play, it always had its own “je ne sais quoi” of connectivity.

The creation of the Internet and the emergence of Web 2.0 has filled me with the same sense of wonder about its potential for connections. For those of us who are web-connected (or web-addicted), the world is now flat and our degrees of separation continue to shrink. We routinely connect globally with colleagues on LinkedIn and Twitter, and we swap stories, pictures, and videos on FaceBook. We StumbleUpon, Digg, Buzz, and Wave.  Hand-written letters and cards were first replaced by email, and now are down to cheery 140-character tweets and text messages.  Brief repeated encounters with an amazing variety of people now pepper our online days and nights.  Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson has diagrammed his network of global friends and I find that it looks like the string art I made in my post-Tinker Toy days.

While we find new ways to connect globally, the very essence of our humanity also draws us nearer to each other. As social beings, we live, love, and work in communities.  Whether in rural communities of farmers, small towns populated with multi-generational families, or large urban cities surrounded by suburbs, we still rely on local connections for much of our day-to-day lives. Connections, that for many of us, are forged by nonprofit community-based organizations.  They are:

• The local hospitals and clinics that provide us with medical care.
• The free-standing libraries where we research and read, and access the Internet if we can’t afford access at home.
• The performing arts organizations that foster our love for music, dance and theatre.
• The advocates that preserve our local habitats and protect our waterways.
• The day care centers and the after-school programs that serve our youth.
• The adoption centers where we find our furry family members.
• The helping hands that provide us with emergency food and housing assistance and keep us safe during disasters.

These organizations don’t work in isolation, though.  Together, they form a network of resources that allow all of us to remain fully participating and thriving members of our communities. They inform and refer us, provide critical services, and collaborate  in ways that benefit us all. They are the neurons that are the basic building blocks of our communities.

So, Tinkers Toys took me to string art and neurons, and I now find myself thinking about the tapestry of humanity:

• How can we take our global string art and weave it into our local neural networks?
• How do we find ways to benefit from this new tapestry?
  
• And, what does that tapestry look like?
  

Would love to hear your thoughts.

–Laura

p.s. Thanks to @askdebra for a comment that she made yesterday during the #NPCons twitter chat about, “Humanity opening doors.”  It was part of my day residue and inspired some of my thoughts.