How are we going to face the mortgage crisis? How are we going to keep the homes that can be saved? How are we going to give people who have lost their jobs and homes the hope to rebuild their lives? How are we going to protect communities that are full of foreclosed homes from disintegrating?

In the 1930′s the New Deal was the project of hope for millions of Americans. The heart of the New Deal was that the government facilitated the creation or work and opportunity for people. I think that there is a new “New Deal” on the horizon in our time. A New Deal where local communities facilitate their own help, their own opportunity and in the end maybe even their own work for people. Central to this new community and local effort  is your local public TV or radio station.

Last year, one TV station, in one market – St Louis’s KETC - was funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to try an experiment. To see if a public TV station could offer this kind of help.  We found out that we could. We did this by helping the helpers and by working to change the story of the crisis.

We discovered that we could help the “Helping” organizations in our city come together as a powerful platform of advice and support. We discovered that we could help the people who were most affected get the confidence and the information to reach out to help that they could trust. We discovered that we could help start to create hope. Real hope. Hope that people were not alone, not helpless, not to blame and that they had easy access to help that they can trust. We discovered that we could change the prevailing story that help was out there to a new story – that we ourselves could be the help.

A quick over view of what happened is here at this link to my personal blog.

But we were just one station in one city. In the scheme of things we were an interesting anecdote. How could the wider story in America become one where people could realistically experience and hence know that they had the answers in their own hands? How could we do that?

Of course the answer to that question has to be that we needed more stations and more cities to take up this work. So CPB has brought together 76 stations in 32 of the hardest hit cities to expand on this idea of helping the helping organizations get together and in reaching out to people and helping them connect safely to this help.

View Facing the Mortgage Crisis Applicants in a larger map

Here they are. You can find them in this map. If you expand the view, the Google Map Page will open and you can see the names and the contact information on the legend. As the project moves forward, each station will add your local resources to the map. In time we will have a map showing the growing platform of help across America.

One of the ways you can also identify if your station is involved is that they will be using branding that looks like this:

Here is how WDET is using this brand on its home page:

Just as Intel co brand with PC makers, so CPB is co branding the “Facing the Mortgage Crisis” project with your stations own brand.

Our hope is that if we can make this story of self help big enough that it will become the new normal. We hope that a national networked effort by Public TV and Radio stations might bring back a very old American idea of the community working together to do important things for each other.

So when you see this brand – this is what it is all about.