This spring and summer, Go Local! and Tacoma Farmer’s Market will offer chances to see, do, eat, experience, learn and, er, lounge at the soon-to-debut Local Living Lounge. Every Thursday, in conjunction with Tacoma Farmer’s Market, The Local Living Lounge will occupy the space officially known as Pierce Transit Theater Square by the spitting silver salmon, and will offer a brilliantly dizzying array of activity and engagement under the banner of local living.
In honor of the new community institution, we hereby demand that “see, do, eat, experience, learn and lounge” replace “live, work, play” in the city’s “please come live here” lexicon.
The Local Living Lounge emerges from the ashes of the burnt-out Buy Local concept, which has been discarded by economic futurists as myopic in its focus. Buying is part of life, but it ain’t living, folks.
Listen to co-founder Patricia Lecy-Davis, president of the Downtown Merchants Group, talk about local living and you might just get inspired to do something about it.
“The farmers market is a powerful, untapped resource for community building,” she says. “The people who frequent the farmers market, I believe, have a deep sense of connection with their community. The farmers market is the perfect platform for conversation about local consciousness. Some people feel strongly about getting out of their car and walking. Some people feel strongly about supporting local farms. Some people feel strongly about getting out of the office and experiencing the city during the week. People come out to the market for all sorts of reasons. But it all comes down to local living.”
As Lecy-Davis tells it, local living is a learned, psycho-kinetic skill — not some self-righteous, ideologue zombie jamboree. The Local Living Lounge is like a sustainable living dojo, and anyone from the community can be a master. Jennifer B. from Tacomamama.com will be the master of “do,” for example, offering activities for kids, who are much easier to train than adults. Mama and the Learning Sprout will bring back the Tile Project. Thursday, May 15, the first day of the Tacoma Farmers Market, kids will have a chance to decorate tiles with words and pictures depicting what they love about Tacoma.
How it will go down
Go Local!, Urban Grace Church and the Tacoma Downtown Merchant’s Group will handle portions of “experience” and “learn” by constantly stoking community dialogue. Each week, Local Living Lounge lizards will pose a new question intended to spark conversation and generate community input. Answers to questions such as “What kind of activities would you like to see in public spaces?” and “How can we create a sustainable community that includes everyone?” will become part of a recorded community conversation. That conversation, in turn, will be distilled and presented in some sort of story — Local Living folks, in a rare showing of conceptual consistency, are open to suggestions about how the story should be told.
“We’ll be collecting data in a much more fun and inspiring way,” says Lecy-Davis.
The goal, she says, is to reach out to the community in honest fashion, rather than reaching out in a surreptitious effort to promote some pet cause.
“When you’re on a committee or work for a group, you have a tendency to adopt all the specific agendas of whatever they’re doing,” says Lecy-Davis. “We’d be much more effective if we tuned in and found out what really makes our community tick, rather than just randomly choosing agendas that seem to mask sense and force feeding them. Even if I come up with a great idea, I could kill myself trying to woo everyone with it. What if I actually found out what my community needed, and acted upon that?”
[Tacoma Farmers Market/Local Living Lounge, opens Thursday, May 15, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Thursday, Tacoma on Broadway between Ninth and 11th, www.tacomafarmersmarket.com]