summertime in the City
If you ’re planning on growing a schoolhouse garden , promoting a biking or carpool baseball club at your work , encouraging rain bbl use by your neighbors , or promoting any other sustainability issue that requires a life-style change by those around you , you might taste readingDiffusion of Innovationsby Everett M. Rogers . Rogers ’ theoretical model has been apply to marketing , public health , agriculture and many other field to promote users to dramatise new idea or technologies .
commute our lifestyle behaviour is hard . Encouraging those around us to change can be even more difficult . These melodic theme may help you spread the word and build a more sustainable residential district .
1. Communication Must Be Two-Way
To disperse mind and promote alteration , it will profit you to ask people what they think . You may find possible barriers or creative ideas that surprise you . Practically , this may have in mind going to neighborhood association meetings or township hall meetings to hash out the creation of a community of interests garden or conducting a threshold - to - door sketch in your neighborhood to rule out what they think of you setting up a chicken coop in your backyard .
2. Find Your Agents Of Change
tie with local residential district members who are observe and trusted . This might mean a local teacher , blogger , club member , or that woman who sit down on her porch every day and know many people in the neighborhood . It will be well-off and more effectual to connect with leaders in the community than to test to change all members of your residential district at once . When hoi polloi see someone similar to themselves assume a young behaviour , they ’re more probable to accept the unexampled melodic theme .
3. List The Advantages
Make the advantage of adopting new conduct very clear . People are more probable to pluck up trash , eat locally , bike more , habituate rain barrels or engage in other sustainable behaviors if they bonk how it will gain them and find it easy to desegregate into their current lifestyle .
4. Start Small
set forth with a pocket-sized - scale test projection for your sustainability egress . For good example , before building community gardens across the city , start out with one in your own vicinity and enrol some friends and neighbors to participate . The tryout will learn valuable lessons about achiever and failure before you surmount up . residential district members may be more potential to adopt larger and more sweeping alteration once they see winner on a smaller level .
