Ten years ago, the notion that I might be involved in launching a new community group was about as likely as the possibility that I might train for a moon mission.  Raising my family in Los Altos, I had my own problems to work on.  Like how to keep my third grader from chucking his lunch in the trash bin daily and which type front to use on our block party invitations.

A call from a neighbor about a potential problem on our street launched me on a straight trajectory path towards community organizing.  I offered to arrange a neighborhood meeting to see what the majority of our neighbors wanted to do.  I found myself sorting through the steps we might take as a group to find a resolution.  Before I realized it, I was smack dab in the center of an age old housing debate within Los Altos that had pitted neighbors against one another for decades.

For the next year I felt like I was permanently strapped onto Drop Zone, slowly being pulled to what seemed like the top, the end, only to find myself plunging back to the bottom at death defying speeds.  The dichotomy of highs and lows, exhilaration followed by disappointment and exhaustion left me longing for those simple type font choices.

Through my process I learned a lot about how our city works.  I had the honor of getting to know each of our City Council members and many of our Planning Commission members personally.   I became the proud owner of a new awareness about the deep commitment that many residents have when it comes to this community.  I was surprised by the fierce desires so many residents had (and still have) to preserve their town, Los Altos which represented a curious cross-section of boomtown and hometown.

It was a nice ego stroke when a small group of civic-minded town leaders approached me about helping to create a new community organization.  There was an existing organization, the Los Altos Homeowners League which had been working as a residential resource for many years.  They had hundreds of loyal members, money in the bank but no gas left in their emotional tanks to carry on.

We assembled our first Board of Directors and started meeting.  We brainstormed a name for our new group, hired a local designer to create a logo for us and I got to pick the type font for our newsletter masthead.  That was the easy part.

Next we worked on our vision and mission.  We decided that LANN would become a resource for any resident struggling with issues which affected or impacted daily life in Los Altos.  We then honed that vision to three primary areas of focus, housing, schools and traffic.  We wanted to reach a collective, high level understanding of difficult and contentious issues that were creating hot spots in town.  We worked to gather as much feedback from our members as possible.   As an organization we wanted to represent the opinions of LANN members to decision makers.

We quickly earned a reputation as a valued resource for residents.

Our first mission statement was a run on sentence which ate up a paragraph.  “The Los Altos Neighborhood Network fosters community awareness, influences community leaders and encourages community members to organize and voice their concerns on issues of importance to the Los Altos Community.”  It was good enough to keep us on track for our first year. 

Each of our board members had personal experience in our key areas of focus and during our first few years we fielded inquiries and requests for help on a wide variety of neighborhood problems.  Some were big, like the (Los Altos Gardens) neighborhood who wanted to organize in order to preserve their charming, affordable enclave from development.  Some were small, like the resident on Echo who refused to take down his front yard Christmas wonderland as the calendar pages flipped into July.

Over the years LANN has become a wonderful stepping stone for residents with an interest in local politics.  Many of our board members have dipped their toe in Los Altos’ waters through their LANN affiliation.  Attending a LANN board meeting is like drinking from a fire hose.  The depth of information and the breadth of knowledge about issues unique to Los Altos are discussed, debated and often resolved through the creative and collaborative ideas generated by a this diverse group.