From Concept to Creation: A Community Message Board
By Tammy Straw-Dunn

Initiated by a small group of neighbors, this community message board was brought to fruition through donations & volunteered time, collaborating with The City Repair Project & the Portland Bureau of Transportation. The design, includes exciting features like living roof, re-purposed hardware, and artistic mosaic work at the foundations, created by neighbors of all ages.
 
The South Burlingame neighborhood is a mix of residents who have lived here since they grew up in the neighborhood in the 1950s, including active senior walkers & gardeners, empty nesters, renting students, and many young, new families. The residents are excited to meet and participate in activities with their neighbors and were looking for better ways to share their interests and hear about planned activities than word-of-mouth or scattered email list serves. 
 
The planning, construction, and continued use of this message board all represent a wonderful and engaging way to foster community… that is easy for any neighborhood to replicate!
 
Here is a fun, pictoral How-To of our process!

​Concrete Foundations
Build form work & structure; pour concrete; remove forms once set.

Mosaic Artwork
Collect, break, & sort tile pieces; mortar design to backer board; mortar designed panels to pair of concrete foundations; grout & sponge-rinse completed tile work.

Living Roof & Sign Board
Mill salvaged wood to build sign board; stain wood surfaces; build roof with waterproof membrane, root barrier, flashing, & drainage openings at lower fascia; line roof bed with moisture blanket & filter fabric;  spread river rocks at lower edge for drainage & roll filter fabric beneath to hold in place; fill roof box with soil mixture; plant with sedum in autumn.  

For the second summer in a row, communitecture is working with Tivnu: Building Justice to construct small-scale installations for communities across Portland, Oregon. Tivnu is a Hebrew word that connotes right-action of a constructive kind, and this organization works to involve and activate teens from across the country by bringing them to Portland each summer to engage in a wide spectrum of service-learning projects.

This year, in early July, we built three little libraries. First we bring the community hosts together with the teen-participants to discuss design ideas, issues of materials and scale, site locations and other considerations. Next, the participants draw up designs and present them to the hosts. Then we are ready to build!

With a small mountain of recycled wooden materials from the ReBuilding Center, we built three little library projects in a single day. Each library was built by a team of 3 to 4 participants who learned how to hold and use construction tools over the course of the day. One library turned out to be a miniature stage for puppet-scale displays, another was tall and vertical for large children’s books, and the third was quite huge and designed for a full-spectrum of shared items, including books.

The following day, the teens took each library to its final community destination. One was in NE at a tea house, another in SE in a suburb, and the third was in the inner SE Brooklyn Neighborhood. These participants had never dug such deep and exact holes before, especially in the hard dry earth of summer, so they shared the task and quickly installed each project in a safe, stable, and permanent fashion.

These are small but extremely powerful projects. What this diverse group of teens built is a fantastic genesis each library’s story, facilitating teamwork and learning through service and partipation. And then the hosts of each little library will embellish and fill them until they are quite unique and appropriate for their community.

At this time last year (summer 2013), there were just over 9,000 little libraries that had been installed and registered in the world. Now there are more than 15,000! This is a quiet, constructive, doable movement to change the world through direct and creative community building. Free Little Libraries seem to be spreading with no signs of stopping!