Welcome, welcome

Hola! Welcome to the wide world of The CVN Forum. The goal for this blog is to be more than just text on a page--we want it to be a simple way to see what CVN does, and to inform what CVN is going forward.

How? By joining in. We invite you to read, comment, and contribute posts.

On what? CVN volunteer and social events, on local non-profits, on ideas of civic engagement and volunteerism more broadly, etc.--we'll tell you more about contributing below...

Why again? We put together this blog for a variety of reasons, starting with the idea of enabling two-way communication for those interested or involved with CVN. Quite practically, we want to tell you what we're considering doing and get your candid thoughts back; that includes feedback on our monthly updates (we've posted a whole slew of them here) and on the events we do, both volunteering and social. The airing of this feedback publicly is good and it allows you to inform where we go from here. More broadly, we'd love to see this blog engage those in and outside of Arlington in discussions on volunteerism, community, and civic engagement for 20-30 somethings in our day (and, to engage with those outside our age group in those some arenas).

Who's going to read and contribute? Well, you, we hope. Like all of our other recent initiatives, we didn't want to assume our ideas were the same as yours, so we asked you--and, based on CVN's Oct. 2009 survey, 61 out of 81 of you are interested in reading, and/or commenting, and/or contributing to a CVN blog--so BAM, here it is!

Some quick thanks: This blog is an outgrowth of many people's ideas and work, dating back to Leadership Team's past and the pioneering work of Miles Grant, CVN's first Chair. He and Eric Legg got then CRM--Community Role Models, CVN's previous name--into the blogosphere through "What's Up Arlington." See the good run of blog posts they did on CRM here.

 We'll be hoping to get some more robust CVN history up here before long, though you can see a start on that series of posts here, including this, the oldest CVN/CRM email on record for the moment, dating back to August of 2005! Tons of thanks to the able recordkeeping of CVN's first County Liaison, Greg Castano, for that one.

And lastly, a big thanks to Jourdan Clandening, CVN's Communications Chair, and her Committee that did a lot to get this blog up--Ivey Glendon, Blog Lead; Tyler Cummings-Bond and Aamir Khwaja, Technology Co-Leads; and Lauren House, Marketing Lead. Good stuff guys!

For more on how you can contribute to what we earnestly hope will be a community effort, check out this overview from Jourdan--there she'll map out the specific ways you might think about helping build The CVN Forum.

Enjoy!

-Brendan

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Brendan O'Connor
Chair
Community Volunteer Network (CVN)