Community as Toy Store

Neal Gouck
Nonprofit Studies Program, Rhode Island College
Providence, Rhode Island

I owe this all to my six year old. We worked through the assignment topic together using “town” instead of community. Once the imagination got warmed up, we agreed that we could live in a toy store. “How cool,” he said, “I could live in a toy store!”

This idea of community includes the concept that we could get access and play with all the things (toys) that we don’t have at home. “I could ride all the things,” says Griffin. Our kids don’t have the assortments of the motorized yard toys like the kid-sized Cadillacs, Hummers, and John Deeres. This might in reality mean that citizens of a town can access and use the community’s resources. For instance it might work like these examples:

• Department of Public works does workshops and licensing training for citizens who can later rent the department’s earthmoving equipment.
• Imagine taking the Park and Recreation Dept’s backhoe home on a Wednesday afternoon.
• Volunteer to be an operator to make a flood swale trench around the new horseshoe pits at the local field.
• Sign out the electric company bucket truck in order to serenade your sweetheart on your first date.

Any idle resource that an agency has could be used for citizens. Can’t find a good idea for a birthday party? Use the school cafeteria and playground or have the librarians arrange a puppet show at the library. These are just some of the ideas that a community which takes on a sense of entitlement towards its resources and assets can create.

My son’s idea of community as a Toy Store matters because the town has all the amenities (toys) that our own homes most times lack. To be able to leverage and control the unattainable assets mentioned in the examples above are the same yearnings that adults have for their own existence (our toy store), but we inefficiently pursue the attainable amenities (think of idle backyard hammocks and trampolines) to be part of our own properties that are better/more efficiently pursued as community property. If the assortments of amenities found common to our homes were made common property much like a library book then we could all borrow to make the best efficiency of idle assets. Transcending the need for ownership could create a toy store like appeal in citizens. My son and most all our children quickly learn the benefits of sharing and borrowing in school, during play dates, and with siblings at home. As adults who live in the toy store community we quickly would learn (or remember from childhood) that by participating and respecting the resources one can quickly access a much greater variety. The community as a toy store concept helps bridge that unattainable demand we have as individuals for access and variety to unlimited toys by shifting our understanding of ownership from permanent towards a temporary shared ownership. Engagement in this community is privileged and predicated by a longstanding and continued commitment to respect and stewardship of the resources.

The implications of seeing your town’s assets as your “new toys” makes one feel entitled and emboldened to engage/participate. The concept that you can play with any toy so long as it is idle (like any child knows: you don’t grab a toy away from someone else who’s using it) makes one more inquisitive in what can I now accomplish since I now have access to resources that I never really had before. How can one use their newfound access to add value personally to their lives, yet while still respecting the asset itself as the community’s property because to do otherwise could jeopardize future participation. The implications of the toy store community would encourage community spending and therefore lead to higher taxes. There would be very little opposition for major purchases on equipment and programs because the idea that the community’s property is accessible to oneself actually gives rise to encouraged overspending. This natural tendency to increase community spending could heighten when popular or hard to schedule resources would necessitate procuring “spares” to shore up citizens’ chances that there would be an idle resources available to them when and if they ever envisioned needing access.

Adopting the Toy Store Community would mean a tremendous increase in out of home experiences and engagement. Ideas of borrowing versus ownership would be relegated to a higher community values of respectful behavior, patience, planning, and coordinating because those competencies would improve one’s chances of maintaining access to what would otherwise be the unattainable variety (toy store) that we all so seek to live among.