The Front Porch

"There were some goths over on one side, role playing, a couple of guys sword-fighting. And there was this lady with long black pigtails, in her 50s or 60s, on a Rascal... doing laps around the square as fast as she could go. Oh, and she was singing at the top of her lungs. I thought, 'The chances are slim that I will have any kind of productive conversation with this lady.' But when she came by, I asked if she would like a bottle of water, and she said 'sure.' She stuck around for a few minutes, and I found out that she was 100% Iroquois, spoke the language fluently, and also Chinese. And she was the funniest person I'd ever met. Not because she was weird, but because she was that witty. And she had come to the Square because she was depressed after the loss of her husband. We go to downtown to make ourselves available to people like that. Whenever I talk to them, I don't bring up God or Christ... they do."

Last night, in a volunteer informational meeting at Second Baptist, I was trying to give people a sense of what The Core is trying to accomplish downtown. And I felt like I was botching it. Nobody really knew what The Core was about, and for some reason I couldn't get it across. Then Phil told the above story, and it just clicked. The meeting was about our plans to establish a social venue in downtown Springfield called The Front Porch, and to find volunteers to help transform it from a smoking hole in the ground into a welcoming community hub. So Phil went on to say that these experiences on the Square have informed his vision of The Front Porch... that it should be a place to make ourselves available to everyone, no matter what they look like, talk like or smell like.

We now own the key to the building at 310 South Avenue, pictured above. We have been working like crazy to get volunteers to help with the interior construction, and at the moment we have 40 signed up, with 60 more having expressed an interest. But we need more! If you believe there needs to be such a place, please e-mail me and let me know what times during the fall you're available, and what special construction skills you have, if any. If it's gonna be a community hub, it'll take a community to build it.