Sometimes, the process of creating change in your neighborhood starts with meeting your neighbors and engaging them in the conversation about how your community looks, how it works, and which of your neighbors struggle and why. It is extremely difficult to make a community-wide change on your own. In an ideal world, many hands come together on community development projects, thus making light work.
I suspect that many folks live in struggling communities, and believe that they are the only ones that are concerned about the conditions around them. These folks don’t speak up because they are afraid that their neighbors might be offended by raising criticism about how the community looks, or don’t believe they have the political power to change goals in the community for transit, or improving parks, or increasing street lighting levels at night, or the many other issues that face communities with higher levels of poverty or disenfranchised residents.
I was at an estate sale this past weekend at a home in a very well-to-do neighborhood. The person running the sale lives in the house next door and mentioned that a customer earlier that day had passed judgment on how the neighborhood had gone downhill in recent years. Now homes in this neighborhood sell in a matter of hours for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, so the real estate market certainly doesn’t agree with that customer’s assessment. I certainly don’t agree, as the homes are beautiful, the yards well maintained, and it appears that homeowners continue to invest in their properties to keep them up to date. But this off-hand comment from a customer shows how strange perceptions can be. More importantly in my opinion, my conversation with the person running the sale devolved into a re-telling of old stories from that neighborhood and my own about instances where neighbors went above and beyond to care for the folks that live next door. To me, that is a more important community characteristic than whether all of the paint is in impeccable condition or some other physical condition metric. Maybe that is where our focus should be in talking about the future of neighborhoods and the vitality of our communities- it’s the non-tangible things such as watching out for the welfare of our neighbors that are the real ingredients that make a community worth preserving. And that willingness to be neighborly is very much a key factor in bringing folks together to make meaningful improvements.
There is a consultant team based in the midwest that works with grassroots community groups to jumpstart positive change through conversation and identification of small, do-able first steps. The consultants at www.SaveYour.Town help community members envision how they want their community to be in the future. These consultants, Becky McCray and Deb Brown, have chronicled numerous instances where extremely small communities have succeeded in rebuilding their downtown economies and drawing in new residents by starting with small, achievable activities. Those achievable activities become success stories, and success breeds success. The folks that had the initial success are encouraged to do more because success is energizing. Their neighbors are encouraged to try out their own projects, leading to additional success stories. In the view of McCray and Brown, there aren’t any bad ideas. If an idea or project fails, just try something else. Success is contagious. I am a fan of the work of McCray and Brown, because it shows how much can be accomplished by volunteer labor in small communities, particularly when compared to the outcomes of community development efforts in larger urban communities with professional planning departments on the City payroll.
A major tenet of the SaveYour.Town philosophy is to NOT start the conversation from a position of lack. Every community has assets. Those community assets are the strong foundation blocks on which you can build the new vision for your neighborhood, your village, your hamlet, etc. You can’t build on lack. You can’t build on a structure or institution that is failing. As an example: Neighborhood X is a food desert, and it is impossible for lower-income families to find healthy vegetables for sale without getting into the car and driving 5 or 10 miles (in some parts of our state, those numbers can easily be changed to 25 and 50 miles). Instead of bemoaning the lack of a vendor that sells vegetables nearby, the ‘build on your assets’ mindset says- there are numerous locations in the community that could be the host for a farmer’s market- such as the parking lot of the high school, the downtown park, the abandoned shopping mall on the edge of town…
What can you do to bring in growers to sell their produce at that location? Having found a suitable site for the market right out of the gate, organizing a farmer’s market simply involves recruiting local farmers, setting a schedule, and advertising the event. As it succeeds and grows, you might look into engaging local musicians to provide entertainment, identifying gaps in the foods offered at the market and bringing in additional vendors, setting up to accept SNAP benefits or WIC vouchers, and with luck, crowd control efforts. You can do this!
There are many different issues that impact how vital your community is. In some communities, it is the availability of affordable rental housing, in others it is the quality of library services, while in others it is the lack of street lighting, creating dangerous dark spots. All of them can be improved in the same way as the food desert was corrected, above. That last one, by the way, is a perfect example of solving the problem organically, at the grassroots level. I know of one neighborhood where the local police beat officer mentioned that several blocks were particularly dark at night due to the size of the trees along those blocks. The neighbors were able to solve that problem immediately by turning on their porch lights. Many even installed timer switches so that the lights would go on automatically at sunset, and turn off at dawn. With the use of LED lightbulbs, this strategy was pretty low cost for the homeowners and was accomplished immediately without having to fight the bureaucracy of the city or the utility company.
So, after all of that, what is the role of the popsicle in all of this? In my own neighborhood, positive change began when a young family invited everyone in the neighborhood to join in for a Pop-up Popsicle Party on a muggy evening in July. They brought a cooler filled with popsicles, freezepops, and fudgesicles, while others brought Klondike bars, ice cream sandwiches, and creamsicles to share. Everyone gathered on the street corner and enjoyed the frozen treats. More importantly, while the children played hopscotch and jump rope on the sidewalk, the adults got to know each other better, and began to compare notes and ideas on issues that they’d been concerned about, but didn’t know that their neighbors were similarly concerned. Out of the first of the popsicle, parties grew some interest in seeing improvements to the playground equipment in our local park. This past year, the City announced plans to make major improvements to that park, and those parents were ready with ideas and consensus on what improvements would be most helpful. As it turns out, the preferred solutions involved less wholesale replacement of the play structures, which will save the City some money. The City officials were flabbergasted that anyone had an opinion (which is a sad commentary on their mindset, most certainly). But ultimately the City is learning how to engage with the neighbors and may be able to improve their planning efforts in the future by reaching out to discover the vision of the neighborhood first.
So, we at Flatley Read are in the consulting business to help communities that want to improve. That means that we are bureaucrats just like the urban planners I mentioned above. Did I just lose a potential client by writing this blog? If so, congratulations! Because that means that you have had success. Please tell me about your success story, because I love to hear how creative folks can be. But I also know that the next steps can be challenging, and sometimes it is very useful to have a helping hand to get to that next goal. If you are interested in the next steps, or how to look at your community challenges through an asset-based lens, please feel free to give me a call. I love the process of brainstorming, planning for community improvements based on building on an asset foundation, and seeing communities blossom and grow. We can help you to identify funding opportunities through grants and loans for projects, but we also want to make sure that those special conditions and relationships that make your community, town, or neighborhood wonderful are celebrated.
The Curmudgeon