Michael Wood-Lewis
Michael Wood-Lewis
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Michael Wood-Lewis has been pulling neighbors together into community since his Indiana childhood spent organizing ball games and visiting neighbors on his evening paper route. Decades later, he and his wife Valerie founded Front Porch Forum, which hosts a pilot network of 140 online neighborhood forums that blankets 25 northwest Vermont towns. Nearly 20,000 households subscribe, including about half of the state's largest city. The resulting news sharing and community building earned a Knight News Challenge 2010 award. Previously, he led an innovative trade association of New England utilities. Earlier, he guided a DC-based consortium of U.S. municipal leaders in developing environmental technologies, building on his experience as an inventor of high-tech recycling equipment. He earned an MS in engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as an MBA.

Blog Entries by Michael Wood-Lewis

Neighborhood Sites Can Awaken Community Involvement

Posted January 19, 2011 | 02:27:00 (EST)

"When I was first on my own I used to bemoan that my fellow renters could hardly be bothered to return a wave but someone kept stealing my newspaper," wrote author Laura Grace Weldon in a recent blog post, "What Makes a Street into a Neighborhood?" "Then we...

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Front Porch Forum: Connecting Strangers in the Neighborhood

Posted August 10, 2010 | 11:11:38 (EST)

Mention the Internet, and most people think of the World Wide Web, of reaching out across the globe for news, long-lost friends, or low-price bargains. But in dozens of Vermont towns, residents are using the web to connect with their back-fence neighbors. In an era where national and global information...

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