Grow your capacity: Communications workshop, community visioning, effective meetings, more — Anacostia Parks and Community Collaborative

Local events and resources

The DC Department of Health now refers to itself as DC | Health.

Fifth Estate Communications is offering Not Your Grandfather's PSAs Wednesday, August 22 for the affordable fee of $7.50! The event is described this way:

In a media landscape that changes on an almost daily basis, Public Service Announcements still have a significant role to play in your communications strategy. Learn the latest digital PSA tools and techniques, along with best practices for traditional media. Presented by Keith Hempel, president of TV Access, one of the largest PSA strategy, production and distribution companies in the U.S. A light lunch will be served.

Imagine: Minnesota Avenue NE 2033, August 22: Sponsored by Minnesota Avenue Main Street and Dreaming Out Loud, this is a community visioning session for the future Minnesota Ave NE. Participants will describe how things would look and feel. The session will be led by Seshat Walker of the General Store, Inc. Free.

Trees 101, August 25: Staff from Casey Trees will cover the basics of trees. By the time participants leave the session, they will have completed the first step in becoming a Casey Trees Citizen Forester.

ICYMI: Morgan Baskin, WCP's Housing Complex reporter, is filling in for the as-yet announced new Loose Lips (contact Morgan with tips for LL: (202) 650-6935, mbaskin@washingtoncitypaper.com). But, wait. There has not been an LL column for several weeks, since Andrew Giambrone left Washington City Paper. So where do you find LL? There's a section every morning in the WCP email District Line Daily. Subscribe to DLD.

Tools and resources

Why It's Important to Post Frequently on Social Media by Jayne Corso offers several important reasons for posting frequently: Keeping followers engaged and informed and perhaps the most important reason, staying relevant.
How to create content that works well with screen readers (GOV.UK) considers a number of issues facing users of screen readers in the UK and the US. The authors also discuss how making website content easier to read by screen readers may make reading and comprehending by low-literacy individuals more difficult.
MapChart.net lets you make custom maps of the United States and countries around the world. If you need finer detail than countries, the tool lets you map counties in the US (image, right), provinces and territories in Canada, and counties in the UK and Ireland, for example. Maps can be downloaded as a .png and embedded on your website for free.
Slidely is a "social video creation platform." Users can add video and images and select Slidely-provided music to create videos. Free.

At work

Perhaps you will find something here that speaks to you: 13 People Share The Books That Changed Their Careers (Thrive Global)
How to facilitate meetings like a human (Atlassian)
Google Spent 2 Years Studying 180 Teams. The Most Successful Ones Shared These 5 Traits (Inc.)
Public Meeting - Secretary's Advisory Committee on Healthy People 2030, September 6 and 7 in Washington, DC. From the invite:

The Committee will continue its deliberations regarding the nation’s health promotion and disease prevention objectives and will develop recommendations regarding: stakeholder engagement and communication; implementation activities; and the roles of health equity, complex systems science and modeling, and summary measures in Healthy People 2030.

Learn something

This surprising, everyday tool might hold the key to changing human behavior is an interesting, informative, and useful read. As the author writes, "As Jenny Anderson writes in Quartz: 'There is ample evidence that we can modify parents behavior through technological nudges.'"

You might of heard of "nudges." The idea was developed by behavioral economist Richard Thaler and explored by Thaler and Cass Sunstein in Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. According to Wikipedia,

Nudge discusses how public and private organizations can help people make better choices in their daily lives. "People often make poor choices—and look back at them with bafflement!" Thaler and Sunstein write. "We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself."

Put another way, "To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not." (behavioraleconomics.com)

Nudge units in and outside government have been the rage for several years. The British government's Behavioral Insights Team had such success that they spun off into their own NGO. (Read more about the BIT.) The University of Pennsylvania also has a nudge unit. "The Penn Medicine Nudge Unit is the world’s first behavioral design team embedded within a health system. Our mission is to leverage insights from behavioral economics and psychology to design and test approaches to steer medical decision-making toward higher value and improved patient outcomes."

Good reads

The Challenge of Scaling Soft Skills (MITSloan Management Review)
Stop buying crap, and companies will stop making crap (Fast Company)
Drop everything and read this now: Why You Should Let Your Children Fail More Often (Thrive Global)
A brain injury diagnosed with a single drop of blood (University of Geneva)
Can the U.S. Save Democracy Through Civics? (Pacific Standard)