Wallingford Community Center

With the economy the way it is, the long-time goal of Wallingford community activists to extract money from the city to bring a community center to Wallingford has drifted further out of reach. But, if we are nothing else, Wallingford is a neighborhood of roll-with-the-punches problem solvers. When they say it can’t be done, we do it just to be show ’em.

Thus, we unveil the “distributed community center” (or “virtual community center”, if you prefer). It’s like a building, but better! It’s many buildings.

We first caught wind of this idea chatting with community activists Mike Ruby and Cathy Tuttle in the Wallingford Neighborhood Office last week: let’s solve at least one of the problems that a community center might address without waiting for help: meeting space.

If your group or organization needs space to meet in Wallingford (and you’re tired of trying to assemble unoccupied chairs together in a coffee shop), Wallingford has a number of options, including meeting spaces for up to 100 people, some for free, many inexpensive. With Mike’s help, we’ve assembled a list of these spaces on this page:

>> Wallingford Community Spaces <<

There’s almost a dozen of them there (and if we forgot one, please let us know).

Of course, this resource listing doesn’t provide all the benefits of a community center. For example, it doesn’t provide the serendipitous interactions you get when multiple organizations share a single space contemporaneously, but maybe we can look to community-wide events like Art Walk to help build those novel and unexpected connections.