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Useful Community Plus
September 24, 2020

In This Issue: Kicking Off "Useful Conversations," Good Reading, and More

September, 2020

Visit us at the Useful Community Development website


Our headline is a great question that we hope all of you are asking in your communities.

For our part, this month we have initiated a low-cost video consulting session for our website visitors. As we have stayed home more during the public health crisis, we experimented with helping some of our readers remotely and found that a short introductory session was both helpful and sometimes sufficient to help our visitors renew hope and set out on a new course.

This week we are announcing the 30-minute Zoom video call, during which we offer our best advice and pointers to you and up to three others from your group, all at the low price of 49 U.S. dollars. At least that is a very low price in comparison with the usual consulting contract, even when you hire locally.

To kick things off, we are offering our newsletter recipients an introductory price of 29 dollars if you book by October 15. Just send a reply email to this newsletter.

Just as with our traditional consulting, we won't take on an assignment unless we think we can be helpful. So if you contact us, give us a brief idea of the subject matter, and if we can add value, we will be in touch with you promptly. Price includes looking over up to two pages of information, maps, or photos before the call.


We have been busy with consulting this month, so didn't finish much new content. We did find time to revise and reposition this page:

organizing to clean up a large-ish or regional-scale park.

As we see above, park maintenance does not have to be perfect, but it does have to be relentless, as illustrated by the worker painting carousel ponies in Parc Monceau, Paris.

Of course it complements our popular page on cleaning up a neighborhood-scale park.

New website visitor questions and submissions this month included:

what to do about criminals in the neighborhood

what to do when a politically connected person files numerous complaints against you and

code enforcement and standing water.




Help for cities trying to figure out micro-mobility (electric scooters and such)

A thoughtful article from the Black perspective about how community development activists and professionals need to embrace cultural context and values

News of a free series of five Saturday workshops for small cities and towns. While geared toward communities that want to participate in a particular network, these thoughts no doubt will be valuable in helping all smaller places prepare for a community planning or visioning process.

A helpful guide to thinking through a drone ordinance, including a link to a model ordinance from California.


REMEMBER to order our ebook if you want to start a neighborhood association. Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of your many options is your best defense against a lot of frustration and wasted work. A list of contents is found on our ebooks page so you can know before you invest the modest 3 or 4 U.S. dollars for this guide.


Our next monthly email will appear in October. Feel free to forward this email to a friend who may be interested, or to reply to this e-mail.


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