Another spontaneous committee has begun collecting clothes and discarded household equipment which is now given free at the store-front office of the Adams-Morgan Organization (AMO).

Because of the regular town meetings, the established politicians in colonial Washington have begun to take notice of Adams-Morgan and even obsequiously seek it out. The people, bless them, have not been conned. At each meeting, the attitude of doing it ourselves seems to strengthen and fear of 'downtown' to weaken. (At a recent ceremony, to count block-by-block votes for an operating council to carry out assembly decisions between meeting, a local judge was scheduled to preside. He was so obviously scornful of the local attitudes and informality that he was asked to leave; an act of lese majeste with profoundly encouraging implications for a neighborhood that just two years ago was totally dominated by a hat-in-hand attitude toward government officials.)

Next on the neighborhood agenda are crime prevention actions (neighborhood patrols, youth programs, run by and not for young people, and whatever else the apparently endless ingenuity of the neighbors can come up with). Also, a committee is forming to start a health-training and service center, and a co-op real estate office. There already is an exemplary co-op grocery store, record store, community paper, and a Video Center which uses portable tape machines as a way for people to engage in what amounts to an audio-visual debate about anything and everything that effects their lives.

Also, there is a highly regarded therapeutic community of recovered drug users; a credit union; a community assistance co-operative for Spanish speaking people; a brilliantly innovative community studies program through Communitas College, also in the neighborhood; volunteer work by Antioch law school students, also in the neighborhood, and a growing feeling that when you say hello to someone on the streets that the greeting has new and neighborly meaning.

My own particular interest (while regularly working on several AMO committees and on its operating Council) is in a project begun by Communitas College and the Institute for Policy Studies. It is called Community Technology, is an incorporated, non-profit group and is made up of a mathematician and an engineer from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, an engineer from the Naval Research Lab, a consulting chemist, an organic farmer, an auto mechanic, a theoretical physicist with a practical turn of mind, a carpenter, two women with lab jobs or training, a woman weaver, a welder (me) and the founder of Communitas.

The object is to study the possibilities of decentralized, small scale (knowledge intensive rather than capital or labor intensive) technology in a community setting. Also, to establish a communications system regarding technics and technology inside the neighborhood, between neighborhoods and 'craft guilds,' to inventory the skills and tools of the neighborhood, and to initiate local projects.

Specific projects already underway: high density fish culture to provide local protein from basement-sized 'fish factories,' hydroponic, high yield rooftop gardens for vegetables, solar power devices, wind power tests, non-wasting waste disposal and utilization, junk reclamation and distribution, and community, co-operative production and transportation.

The scientific method itself, which is just common sense and experimentation, is a denial of the failed, big-scale tragedies of farm, factory and forum which now threaten to bury us in their rubble. And, it seems to me, this same common sense approach now demands that we look to small victories in small places, to creative community, to neighborliness, as the way to our most grand victory--the return to human scale, human purpose, and human, rather than institutional, values.

Karl Hess, a former speechwriter for Senator Barry Goldwater, was instrumental in launching the Adams-Morgan neighborhood government.

In some places, like the neighborhood in which I live, people understand the need to decentralize...