Last summer, Nantucket Data Platform, with the support of ReMain Nantucket, launched the Island Life Survey. The results offer great insights on community values that are based on a robust method and are weighted to the population to reflect the community as a whole. A few data points jumped out at us and either surprised us or …
Category Archives: A note from ACK•Now
The Fall and Rise of Annual Town Meeting
One of the facts that we find particularly compelling and one of the data points that helped us decide to form ACK•Now is the level of engagement citizens have at Annual Town Meeting. As you can see, the budget of the town which includes the General Fund, Airport, Our Island Home, Solid Waste Enterprise Fund, Sewer …
The Housing Hail Mary
We are all familiar with the law of supply and demand. When demand is high and supply is low, costs are high. But if you increase supply, costs go down. This is Economics 101 stuff. It makes perfect sense. Until you come to Nantucket. Here, demand outpaces supply to such an extent that, except in …
2020 vision. No pun intended.
As you may know, ACK•Now, as an organization, got up and running a few months ago. We had our 501(c)(4) designation, we had a bank account, and we had a post office box. Since then, we’ve been working out of a temporary office space that has been cleverly disguised as a few community coffee shops. And, …
Citizen’s (Articles) United
One of the things we’ve been doing for the past couple of weeks is pulling together (uniting) into a single document nearly all of the pertinent and available information regarding the 53 citizen’s articles that the town will be putting on the ATM warrant in April of this year. You can download the doc from …
The canary in the eel grass bed
If you didn’t figure it out from our email note last week, let us make it clear: we are pretty much data nerds. We find data to be both compelling and interesting. And one stat that has been followed semi-religiously by the town and by fishermen is the scallop harvest. It won’t surprise long-time islanders …
Data you might not know. But can’t ignore.
We hesitate to blow your mind on the last day of 2019, but this is the kind of data nearly everyone needs to see. Here are a few of the most eyebrow-raising facts and the sources of that data that we have uncovered in our work. 32,000 cars. There are 28,000 vehicles on Nantucket year-round (many …
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Is change possible? Certainly.
This week we explore the impact on our lives of something we experience every day on Nantucket: Uncertainty. As you know, our organization was founded around the idea of reversing the erosion of quality-of-life on Nantucket. But what exactly does that mean? Often when we talk about quality-of-life issues, we are zeroing in on those things …
Thoughts on what divides Nantucket and what brings us together
Nantucket is often a peculiar place. There is an imaginary, yet obvious, divide here among several kinds of people. The most often talked about is the division between people who were born on Nantucket (the natives) and those who were born somewhere else (the washashores). But it goes even deeper than that. There are some …
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Being thankful this week.
Things have been relatively quiet on Nantucket this week with the Thanksgiving holiday. There’s plenty of time to stop and reflect upon the things for which we are thankful. And there are a lot of them. One only needs to take a walk on the quiet beaches or invite friends and family into one’s home …