The Neighborhood Exchange Box might be coming to a community near you

Q: If you could send a gift box to another neighborhood in Philly that was filled with all of the things that make your neighborhood unique, what would go in your box?

This week, Mt. Airy USA and the John Bartram Association (JBA) are kicking off their joint Neighborhood Exchange Box project, which will invite Mt. Airy and Southwest Philadelphia residents to exchange stories about their neighborhoods.

Though the neighborhoods are geographically distant, they’re connected via the Reimagining the Civic Commons Initiative: Mt. Airy has Lovett Library and Park, and the Southwest has Bartram’s Garden.

“I think what we’re trying to really get at is, how do we connect all these civic assets?” said Kim Massare, Mt. Airy USA’s director of development and community programs. “And we can really only connect them by connecting people. They’re as much about places as they are about people.”

The Exchange Box works like this:

• Mt. Airy USA will set up a mobile booth for the next two Wednesdays at the neighborhood’s Supper Sessions, an outdoor dining event, on the 7100 block of Germantown Avenue.
• Residents can write down stories about Mt. Airy or be recorded telling their stories in a video booth, as well as bring items from home that they feel represent the neighborhood — images, recipes, etc. — for the Exchange Box.
• Next Wednesday, Sept. 28, members of JBA will join in the Supper Session, view what stories and items have been collected so far, and share seeds and plants from Bartram’s Garden.
• On Oct. 16, a group from Mt. Airy USA will bring the Exchange Box to BGA’s fall HarvestFest, where JBA will invite Southwest Philadelphia residents to contribute their own stories and items to the box.

The Free Library of Philadelphia is also helping the partners staff the story booth, will attend the exchange dinner and will help find a “digital home” for the stories and items collected, according to Massare.

The booth’s debut at Supper Session. (Courtesy photo)

“Philadelphia is still very much a city of neighborhoods, and this project will start a dialogue with two communities that might not otherwise interact because of their geography,” said Stephanie Phillips, JBA’s assistant director. “What do they have in common? How do they define their neighborhoods? Are there any artifacts that they would wish to share with another community?”

The Exchange Box is one of the first “early-action projects” the Civic Commons initiative is supporting with its Innovation Fund, the small pot of money available for the five capital projects’ partner organizations to test out their small-scale ideas for connecting the Civic Commons sites, according to the Fairmount Park Conservancy’s senior director of civic initiatives, Jennifer Mahar.

From the conservancy’s perspective, the goal of the Exchange Box is to learn what works or doesn’t — how the community benefits or doesn’t — from such initiatives, Mahar said. If it proves beneficial, it might be replicated in other neighborhoods or other Civic Commons cities.