No single thing can make a neighborhood stronger and healthier. Effective community development – comprehensive development – takes many hundreds of things, and many people and organizations.
Showing posts with label community development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label community development. Show all posts
How do you convey the excitement and hard work that goes into making neighborhoods stronger?
We've tried a lot of different ways over the seven years of the New Communities Program, and probably the closest we've come is in the new video below by Sarahmaria Gomez and Alex Fledderjohn of TuMultimedia.
This is the first half of a longer piece they created as a "thank you" tribute to Jonathan Fanton, the president of the MacArthur Foundation. It captures the voices of neighborhood residents talking about:
a community garden on Maypole Avenue in East Garfield Park;
the South Chicago Art Center;
a mural in North Lawndale;
the La Estancia development in Humboldt Park;
a mariachi band at Cooper School in Pilsen;
the Oakwood Shores mixed-income development in Quad Communities;
the West Haven Giants baseball team;
the Little Village Boxing Gym; and
the foreclosure prevention efforts in Chicago Lawn.
All that in five minutes! I think the reason it works so well is because the work it represents is so genuine and real.
There are plenty of interesting positions posted on npo.net, but what's interesting to me is how jobs in certain types of work, or certain neighborhoods, are being advertised via niche web sites.
The Greater Humboldt Park Community of Wellness is spreading the word about open positions for a bike shop manager, a couple of research jobs and a community liaison position with the Active Transportation Alliance.
Claretian Associates is promoting jobs at the soon-to-open Victory Centre of South Chicago, an assisted living facility with 112 apartments. Available positions include nurses, CNAs, office manager, receptionist, food service staff, maintenance staff, community life manager, among others.
Youth from all over Chicago could connect to summer jobs via the notice by Logan Square Neighborhood Assn. about jobs through the Chicago Public Schools, Chicago Park District, After School Matters and the Department of Family and Support Services.
I have a well-practiced line about urban violence that goes something like this: a healthy community, one that truly engages its youth in positive activities and that has a solid network of job and training opportunities for adults, that community will be able to reduce the brutal street killings that mark a less-healthy place, a place where people are angry and lack any real hope for their own future.
But with the gun violence continuing every day in the very neighborhoods where we work to build those healthier systems, I'm having trouble getting those words out of my mouth.
On Monday and Tuesday, a man was killed and a teenager injured in a Southeast Side shooting; a 28-year-old died after being shot in West Humboldt Park; and another man, 22, was killed in North Lawndale. These are cold-blooded murders -- one man walking up to another and shooting him dead.
So when I was repeating my theories about healthier communities to my mother the other day, I had to stop and back up: Either I'm just plain wrong or the efforts underway in the New Communities Program neighborhoods are just not big enough, not good enough, not widespread enough to combat what one of my colleagues has called "a culture of thuggery."
In neighborhoods where one man shoots another for taking a cigar dropped outside of a West Side club, existing efforts are clearly not enough. Getting guns off the street is part of the answer, yes, but at heart this is a human and societal problem, a deep wound in the urban heart that we have not yet learned how to heal.
I hang out with a lot of very smart people but tonight was different. Tonight I was in the presence of genius.
After spending the day with other community development practitioners at a LISC Learning Forum in Detroit, including a tour and workshop in the Morningside and East English Village neighborhoods, we were treated to a remarkable dinner presentation by 93-year-old civic activist Grace Lee Boggs.
She surprised us over and over again. First, this daughter of Chinese immigrants with a Ph.D. in philosophy, who later married African-American labor activist James Boggs, well, first she introduced an 11-minute rap video by the Detroit artist Invincible, a young woman whose words burn deeply as she spits them out against a backdrop of apocalyptic post-industrial Detroit. "Selective memory, convenient amnesia," she chants, and a whole lot more.
The video features a few snippets of interview with Grace Lee Boggs and other activists, but is really about youth and how, in Boggs' words, "their need to be useful can be the foundation for life in the 21st Century." I've pasted the video, directed by Joe Namy, at the end of this post, in two parts.
I can't do justice to what came next. Ms. Boggs spoke to us, in a quiet but forceful voice, about the whole sordid history of America's industrial cities, tracing the fall of the auto industry, the construction of highways that helped cut in half the city's population, and after years of economic decline for working-class African American residents, the "young people harassed by police who they thought of as an occupying army," after all that came the five days of explosive rebellion in July of 1967 that marked the beginning of a whole new era for Detroit, an era of decline that is starkly illustrated in the Invincible video and that we saw for ourselves on our bus tour this afternoon.
From all this, Boggs sees a bright future. In 1992, Boggs and her husband founded something called Detroit Summer, which used gardening, of all things, to bring older residents together with youth, and which taught those young people, "who thought everything was instantaneous, a sense of process." The same movement spawned a youth bicycle-fixing operation, Back Alley Bikes, the Avalon Bakery that set up shop in the wreckage of the Cass Corridor, and the Earthworks urban farm created by a Capuchin monk to grow food for a soup kitchen and a home for teenaged mothers.
Detroit is among a handful of cities, including Milwaukee, New York and Chicago, that have begun converting their vast acreages of vacant land into productive agricultural space. Was it a coincidence that three groups out of eight at the afternoon workshops suggested "green" development of Detroit's east side expanses, or were we seeing the same thing that Boggs and the seniors and youth saw: the promise of Detroit's next phase? "The whole concept of reconnecting to the earth has such magic to it," she said, especially in the face of today's "energy crisis and planetary crisis."
Referring to the gardening work and the rap video, Boggs said, "we have a model and inspiration for young people across the country." For sure, yes, but the inspiration for me was Grace Lee Boggs herself, a brilliant woman who left us, tonight, with a mandate to carry her work forward.
Do you love your website? That was the question asked of community development practitioners at a recent panel discussion at the 2008 Making Media Connections conference, sponsored by the Community Media Workshop.
Most of us would probably answer with a spectrum of colorful responses, but the session featured four non-profit and public-sector professionals who can mostly answer with a firm "yes." They told listeners how they reached that point, and reporter Ed Finkel tells the story on the New Communities Program web site.
Almost four years ago, I bought a house in the Back of the Yards/Garfield Boulevard area with the help of Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago. Partly in gratitude, partly to make new friends in my new neighborhood, I joined their local advisory board.
Tonight's board meeting was one of the best I've been to in a long time. Though home sales are in a slump, our numbers are better this year than they were last year, largely because we were without a local director in the office. I'd like to give a big shout-out to our new neighborhood director, Emilio Carrasquillo, for his tireless dedication and visible presence in the neighborhood. It's his drive and persistence that have brought in homebuyers and increasing numbers of homeowners looking to avoid foreclosure.
Our board is also regaining energy. Before I arrived, NHS was a strong presence at local CAPS meetings. Staff and board members had worked hard and successfully to reduce crime and get problem buildings out of the hands of criminals, turning them into newly rehabbed, owner-occupied homes. Their work made news, including this story from December 2003. But everything has a life cycle, and the NHS-CAPS relationship withered a bit in later years, with changing staff and board members.
When I joined the board, I was told one of my responsibilities was to attend my local beat meeting. Frankly, I was willing, but not too excited about it. First, I know schools and kids a lot better than I know beats and cops, and my years teaching alternative high school have left me with some concern that "fighting crime" can all too easily turn into locking up our kids, not helping them grow. But I made a promise to go and have tried to keep it.
Our local beat meeting has struggled, too--there was also a leadership void there, and we're still working on having the district formally recognize the new local leadership. City cuts in CAPS community liaisons have also really hurt the grassroots organizing that gets people to the meeting.
But at tonight's NHS meeting, people were ready to get up and try again. So we've created our own form of "March Madness"--next month, all seven or so of us will go to each other's beat meetings to see what we can learn from each other. There are three of us in the same beat who are going to work together to make sure we have our end of the meeting organized--agendas, recruitment. Then, we'll put pressure on our district to start sending us the same officers more consistently, giving us better updates on responses to our tips and requests from one meeting to the next. Another board member is planning to revive his local block club; we've got his back, and maybe watching him will help some of the rest of us (like me) see what we can do on our own blocks.
To top it all off, Emilio and at least one, maybe even two of my fellow board members will be joining me at the NCP Getting It Done Conference on March 26 and 27.
Last Thursday's Chicago Neighborhood Development Awards -- the first I've attended in nearly five years of "scribing" for LISC's New Communities Program, I'm embarrassed to admit -- brought home the reach of the community development field in Chicago for me in a way that nothing else quite has to date.
Patrick Barry's earlier post here about having drinks with 1,400 of his closest friends was no joke - the ballroom at the Hyatt where the awards ceremony took place held more than 100 tables, and if not everyone quite knew everyone, the sense of familiarity and the friendly buzz of coming together around a shared purpose were both palpable.
The fact that the people in that room included Mayor Daley -- who interrupted a visit with the Secretary General of the United Nations to give the keynote lecture -- and the long roster of aldermen and city department heads showed the field's steadily growing clout.
And LISC/Chicago's Andy Mooney made a one-off reference to the possibility that clout could grow considerably later this year, when he mentioned that "one of our own" could be elected president of the United States. Andy's reference to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's candidacy did not just refer to Obama's quarter-century-long ties to Chicago, but his work as a community organizer in the 1980s.
Whatever your preference in the remaining Democratic primaries, or in the general election in the fall, it's hard not to think that having "one of our own" rise this far thus far is a noteworthy development in and of itself for Chicago's communities.
Five neighborhood tours have been announced for the March 26-27 community development conference in Chicago. The two-day meeting, Getting It Done: New Tools for Communities, will be hosted by 16 Chicago neighborhoods that have planned, launched and executed the nation's largest demonstration in comprehensive community development, the New Communities Program (NCP).
The gathering will bring together hundreds of street-level experts in everything from youth programming and safety to retail development and health care. Chicago practitioners will be joined by counterparts from other cities around the nation that are launching similar comprehensive community development programs.
LOGAN SQUARE: SCHOOLS Learn how the Logan Square Neighborhood Association built a nationally recognized program of parent and community involvement at school-based "community learning centers" that offer afternoon and evening programming.
WEST HAVEN: RETURNING PRISONERS St. Leonard's Ministries explains how it helps former prisoners re-enter the community through training, supportive housing and attention to basic needs. Includes discussion with program participants and tour of the Michael Barlow Center and its food-service training kitchen.
PILSEN: JOBS AND MORE Visit the Instituto del Progreso Latino , which offers comprehensive bi-lingual programming ranging from adult education and immigration services to financial counseling and employment services at its Center for Working Families.
LITTLE VILLAGE: PARTNERSHIP Take a trip to densely populated La Villita (Little Village), where a university, corporate sponsor and local public schools are working with Little Village Community Development Corporation to develop a dormitory for student teachers working in the community – plus a new community center and park.
The writers and practitioners at LISC/Chicago's New Communities Program started this blog to provide a venue for "quick hits" and commentary about community development in Chicago and elsewhere. Let us know what you think, and if you'd like to contribute as an author.
How do you convey the excitement and hard work that goes into making neighborhoods stronger?
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