The Grand Idea
Aug. 15th, 2013 08:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraJeremy invited me out for beer and sliders after work last night.
Jeremy is my co-VISTA, 24 years old, an extremely bright, soft spoken, personable and good looking kid, and this casual sit down felt like a redemption of sorts: I have a good 35 years on my team members, and I have been deathly afraid that they would see me as some sort of caricature of an eccentric old person – kind of like Dennis Hopper in River's Edge. And I think Jeremy did view me like that for the first couple of weeks.
Younger people are simply not interested in older people. We register as a kind of patio furniture. Something with a specific function – parent, teacher, guy behind the counter in the liquor store – but over all, a rather uninspiring aspect of their life decor. I'm not sure why that is exactly, or whether that differentiation exists in other cultures. Maybe it's an artifact of an educational system that stratifies people by age.
Of course, I don't see all that much difference between me and a 24 year old kid, which is no doubt delusional on my part. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, I see the experiential difference. But my tastes, aptitudes and desires today are exactly the same as they were when I was in graduate school. I've never aspired to live my life any differently than I lived my life during graduate school. There've been no developmental changes. I've never aspired to own things like a house or other possessions that would root me. I've been happy to float through experiences and harvest them as I may.
Anyway, Jeremy and I had a good time, and chatted up a storm – about his life, about Our Project.
I have a really killer idea for Our Project, which is that I want to start a business with these kids. There are easily a dozen youth projects in the passingly strange city of Poughkeepsie, and they all proceed along the same dull programatic lines: Somehow capture these kids in a classroom and then lecture them about things they don't care about like leadership qualities and financial literacy.
I am here to tell you that when there's nothing in the house to eat for breakfast except flat Fanta Orange and the stale remains of a bag of Doritos, and your big brother is just about to begin a two year vacation in Attica at the taxpayers' expense, you don't give a shit about leadership qualities and financial literacy.
And these are the kids I want to reach.
The bright kids the world has given up on. The kids that want in on the hustle.
So anyway, I figured: Food carts! I did the Hudson River pedestrian bridge last weekend. I swear, I passed over 1,000 people on that Bridge during that hour. Say the Bridge draws 10,000 people a week, 40,000 a month in summer. That's not an inconsiderable number for a marginal place like Poughkeepsie.
Where does the Bridge let all these tourists off? In this parking lot surrounded by burnt out warehouses and crack houses. I kid you not.
Why isn't the City of Poughkeepsie buying those burnt out warehouses, leasing them to cool eateries like the Dinosaur Barbecue and Starbucks for a buck a year, and trying to generate some kind of revenue stream off all those hungry and thirsty tourists? Isn't that kind of an obvious public policy intervention?
Figure manufacturing ended here in the 1940s, and was superseded by a service industry – prisons. Not good. Combine this with white flight and proximity to the Great Crack Cocaine Superhighway 87, and I guess that's why Poughkeepsie is the pit it is. But I keep seeing Potential Potential Potential. I wish I was Mayor and had about $20 million in federal urban redevelopment funds.
Anyway, I figured food carts serving smoothies. Set them up on either end of the Bridge. Capture some of those tourist dollars. No one else is doing this!
Problem is that we have exactly zero dollars for capital expenditures.
Jeremy thinks the idea is great. We're trying to sell the organization on a Kickstarter campaign since believe it or not, I have been able to unearth exactly one foundation that gives money for capital expenditures, and it only funds one in six projects, and of course, we would have no history of success to point to in the grant application. Most foundations only give money for programtic development. Right, like what the world needs is more bureaucracy -- not.
Jeremy is my co-VISTA, 24 years old, an extremely bright, soft spoken, personable and good looking kid, and this casual sit down felt like a redemption of sorts: I have a good 35 years on my team members, and I have been deathly afraid that they would see me as some sort of caricature of an eccentric old person – kind of like Dennis Hopper in River's Edge. And I think Jeremy did view me like that for the first couple of weeks.
Younger people are simply not interested in older people. We register as a kind of patio furniture. Something with a specific function – parent, teacher, guy behind the counter in the liquor store – but over all, a rather uninspiring aspect of their life decor. I'm not sure why that is exactly, or whether that differentiation exists in other cultures. Maybe it's an artifact of an educational system that stratifies people by age.
Of course, I don't see all that much difference between me and a 24 year old kid, which is no doubt delusional on my part. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, I see the experiential difference. But my tastes, aptitudes and desires today are exactly the same as they were when I was in graduate school. I've never aspired to live my life any differently than I lived my life during graduate school. There've been no developmental changes. I've never aspired to own things like a house or other possessions that would root me. I've been happy to float through experiences and harvest them as I may.
Anyway, Jeremy and I had a good time, and chatted up a storm – about his life, about Our Project.
I have a really killer idea for Our Project, which is that I want to start a business with these kids. There are easily a dozen youth projects in the passingly strange city of Poughkeepsie, and they all proceed along the same dull programatic lines: Somehow capture these kids in a classroom and then lecture them about things they don't care about like leadership qualities and financial literacy.
I am here to tell you that when there's nothing in the house to eat for breakfast except flat Fanta Orange and the stale remains of a bag of Doritos, and your big brother is just about to begin a two year vacation in Attica at the taxpayers' expense, you don't give a shit about leadership qualities and financial literacy.
And these are the kids I want to reach.
The bright kids the world has given up on. The kids that want in on the hustle.
So anyway, I figured: Food carts! I did the Hudson River pedestrian bridge last weekend. I swear, I passed over 1,000 people on that Bridge during that hour. Say the Bridge draws 10,000 people a week, 40,000 a month in summer. That's not an inconsiderable number for a marginal place like Poughkeepsie.
Where does the Bridge let all these tourists off? In this parking lot surrounded by burnt out warehouses and crack houses. I kid you not.
Why isn't the City of Poughkeepsie buying those burnt out warehouses, leasing them to cool eateries like the Dinosaur Barbecue and Starbucks for a buck a year, and trying to generate some kind of revenue stream off all those hungry and thirsty tourists? Isn't that kind of an obvious public policy intervention?
Figure manufacturing ended here in the 1940s, and was superseded by a service industry – prisons. Not good. Combine this with white flight and proximity to the Great Crack Cocaine Superhighway 87, and I guess that's why Poughkeepsie is the pit it is. But I keep seeing Potential Potential Potential. I wish I was Mayor and had about $20 million in federal urban redevelopment funds.
Anyway, I figured food carts serving smoothies. Set them up on either end of the Bridge. Capture some of those tourist dollars. No one else is doing this!
Problem is that we have exactly zero dollars for capital expenditures.
Jeremy thinks the idea is great. We're trying to sell the organization on a Kickstarter campaign since believe it or not, I have been able to unearth exactly one foundation that gives money for capital expenditures, and it only funds one in six projects, and of course, we would have no history of success to point to in the grant application. Most foundations only give money for programtic development. Right, like what the world needs is more bureaucracy -- not.
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no subject
Date: 2013-08-15 01:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-15 01:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-15 03:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-15 03:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-15 04:13 pm (UTC)Smoothies are not exactly what I would want as I stepped off a touristy bridge. I'd be thinking either "light lunch" or "I'm really thirsty."
no subject
Date: 2013-08-15 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-15 08:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-15 08:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-16 12:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-17 11:19 am (UTC)According to Wikipedia, Poughkeepsie is the birthplace of Mountain Girl of Grateful Dead/Electric KoolAid Acid Test fame and Ed Wood (now deceased), essayed in the eponymous film by Johnny Depp. :-)
It's also where G.Gordon Liddy tried to prosecute Tim Leary in the 1960s. Are either of them alive still?
Kickstarter thing captures a little of what you're talking about there.
no subject
Date: 2013-08-16 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-17 11:14 am (UTC)http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/01/magazine/crack-s-destructive-sprint-across-america.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
Article was written in 1989 as the crack cocaine epidemic was winding down. (Although I have stumbled across one crack pipe -- literally! -- since relocating to Poughkeepsie.)
But actually the reason I know about it is because I have a friend who wrote his PhD thesis on the role of highways in drug epidemics.
I 87 connects with I 17 (86), which is how the crack epidemic hit towns like Elmira and Binghamton. The other complicating factor is that after light industry moved out, the major economic engine in these towns tended to be prisons. Inmates' families moved to be close to where loved ones were incarcerated. Definitely a part of the story of how these tiny picturesque towns sank into utter squalor in less than half a century.
no subject
Date: 2013-08-19 02:02 pm (UTC)