The list: Use your private projects to contribute to the culture of your neighborhood.

"Use your private projects to contribute to the culture of your neighborhood."
- The Embedded Neighbor Checklist

I recently took a trip down to Pittsburgh to hang out with Jake. We bought him a Steelers decal for his bike helmet to help him seem like the kind of good Pittsburghian who shouldn't be run over. It's not going to be on Sartorialist any time soon, but it works in a strange way.

More to the point, we took a tour of an abandoned Steel Mill for which a group of local folks with ties to the old mills have been raising money in order to turn it into a national park. It was a fascinating tour that featured live humans who used to work at that particular mill as well as, coincidentally, tourists from Northwest Indiana who work at a mill in their area (and who brought their own hard hats and metatarsal shoes with them! Check out one of them in the blue helmet).

One of the best parts of the tour was coming across this giant metal wire sculpture of a deer's head. The mill was abandoned for thirty year, which left a lot of opportunity for some very elaborate and beautiful graffiti and art. I was impressed that the artists who used this space paid homage to the history of the mill by creating a piece that melded the industrial history of the mill (the metal wires) with the natural history of the mill (the abundant deer in the area). It seemed like a nice example of using your personal projects -- in this case sculpture -- to contribute to the culture of your neighborhood.

Are you working on a personal project that could help your neighborhood? Use "The Neighbor's Workbook" to make it happen.