Could costs ruin your neighborhood's traditional summer festival? Here's an interesting article from Chicago on the subject. The message is that if you have a late summer or autumn festival coming up, get busy on your planning, lest the costs go even higher.

In good news, Colorado passed a new law aiming to smooth out the difficulties for factory-built homes, an especially promising approach to keeping housing costs down. Read about the unified modular housing code to see if this approach could be helpful in your state.

If you are baking in the summer heat, it is time for your community to take action to blunt the effects of increasingly hot summers to the extent possible. Here's a good concise article on plausible action steps. The 2021 article was republished in 2024, and it seems just as apropos in 2025, don't you think?

War and violence are dominating our news again. I suggest two good resources that fit the times.

A tool called the Dignity Index describes 8 ways we might relate to people with whom we have political differences, ranging from dignity to contempt. I have been aware of this U.S.-invented tool since right after its inception in 2022, but when I revisited it recently, it seems that it may be applicable to all cultures. Writ large, I think contempt keeps wars and polarization going. Start referring to the continuum between dignity and contempt in your neighborhood, community, state, and national conversations, and point out that respect is both possible and productive. If you live outside the U.S., reply to let me know if you think it is a stretch to say these ideas can be helpful elsewhere.

Along the same lines, the National Institute for Civil Discourse has shared a simple active listening exercise that they call the Constructive Dialogue Exercise. The one-page sheet shows how to guide a roomful of participants through an experience that may set the table for dealing with neighborhood, political, or policy differences. I used this exercise once this week, and my only suggestion would be that you might want to allot more than the suggested time, especially where people are not well acquainted. Many participants, some strangers before our event, wanted to take the entire scheduled time on the first question. The file contains a useful little handout too.

Longer days and maybe a bit more leisure time make summer a great time for planning upcoming community events. Some pages from our website stand out when thinking about possible happenings for the remainder of 2025. How about a neighborhood-scale parade, a neighborhood tour, or a one-day conversion of a few parking spaces into a "park" just for the fun of it? A neighborhood park cleanup is always a good idea too.

If none of these work for you, just check out the community development ideas page.

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