Bumping Places

In his book, Neighbor Power, Jim Diers speaks of "bumping places", those spots in a community where people meet. We get a sense of our larger community by greeting familiar faces in these places. This reminds me of family identities and the importance of seasonal gatherings and traditions to solidify, in our family, who we are and gives us identity.

I've been on the prowl for Clareview's bumping places.

• Londonderry Mall. We don't have our own, so we go there.
• In the mall is the Library, which hosts programs for tots, childrens and teens, toastmasters, and english language learning.
• Also in the mall is the Tae Kwon Do facility. A crowd of proud parents gather outside the large glass wall.
• In the mall there's a gathering place with leather seating and television monitors. There's a police information station. There's young folks and old. Why aren't the children in school?
• The "Town Centre", touted by a Clareview Outline Plan. This is where we have the Superstore, the big box stores, strip malls, and Wal-Mart. Where in this "Town Centre" can people gather? That plan is beginning to depress me. It speaks of large developers, and land cheap for building affordable housing. Our community has been planned for "basic" from the very beginning. Are we understood?
• The Belvedere station. I see a gang of young black men hanging out by the washrooms and impressing each other with their toughness.
• The Belevedere heated shelter, which has the bus driver's rest stop. No-one in the shelter looks at each other.
• Our own strip mall has the Mac's store. There's a new book exchange store, "Never without a Book." Farther down is a popular dance studio, Dance Theme. This place is swarming with parents on Saturday morning.
• The hockey parents, I imagine, gather around the Clareview arena and Homesteader community league outdoor rink.
• There's usually several bargain hunters gathered around the second hand drop off in the Giant Tiger strip mall. This is a very busy strip.
• All the Tim Horton's are busy. The now defunct Conversations cafe is closed for lack of business. Why? Does name recognition carry that much weight?
• The Belmont town centre has vacancies. The McDonald's is undergoing renovations. I do know children from the local school swarm the facility at lunch hour. The dollar store is closed. It had dire warnings to the children on the consequences of shoplifting.
• I'm told we have a community garden. I must go see it.
• We host the one of the big indoor soccer fields for the city.

Reading what I've written and observed, it seems that the natural bumping places are Timmy's, Londonderry, and the Giant Tiger lot. Hockey parents rule. Bargain hunters rule. This is a young family community These locations weren't identified on the community plan. Do we build up the natural gathering places, seeking to understand their popularity, or do we build assets within the "Town Centre" that was planned for us?

P.S. How could I forget? Movies 12. I see young couples arm in arm strolling along the grassy curb through industrial Belvedere, groups of friends, families, and caregivers with their charges, all off to the movies. Bollywood is making an appearance, a nod to our growing Indian community.

Book Review - Neighbor Power

How did I get hooked on this book? I stopped at an information booth set up in the Giant Tiger parking lot. An invitation to help spend $10,000 caught my eye. The invitation came from the local Crime Council. I and a friend went to the meeting, and voila, we are board members. *sigh*. We were shown tons of resources and materials that I hardly knew of. Another invitation caught my eye:

Neighbourhood Engagement
People are the answer!
November 17, 2009 at Santa Maria Goretti Centre (11050‐90 Street)
5‐9 PM
A Light Supper will be provided. No Cost. Parking available .
Registration is required, seating is limited
Please call (780)442‐4972

I signed up for that. And I got to asking myself, who is this Jim Diers and what is this talk about Neighbour Power? So I got the book. I've just finished it. In all my wanderings, why am I pursuing this? Because my gut says that neighbourhood engagement builds genuine human interaction between those who need help and those who give it. I am wandering full circle back to the reason I started this blog in the first place. What follows are marked passages and my own comments from sections of this book.

"organizers organize organizations" - When inspiring change in a community, don't run the show. Listen. Otherwise the initiative is dependent on you. When you go, the reforms will go too. Empower people to bring about the changes they want.

"Asset Based Community Development - ...Government, like social service agencies and other institutions, tends to disempower communities by focusing on their deficiencies and fostering dependence on outside interventions. Asset-based community development, on the other hand, builds on the resources that are found in every community. These assets include a community's associations and all its members, even those members who have been labeled and dismissed: the disabled, welfare mothers, at-risk youth, and elderly; all persons of every description have skills, knowledge, and passion to contribute to their community. (p. 13)" This sets me to wondering; what assets do we have in Clareview? We definitely have families, sports parents, ethnic, immigrant communities, at-home seniors. I've just discovered that we have a strong interest in city farming. It would be great to build an inventory of assets. For further reading, I should check out the Asset-Based Community Development Institute (ABCD, get it?).

[Local governments]...resources are not keeping pace with increasingly complex social issues...voters are reluctant to approve additional resources becasue they feel a sense of alienation from their government at all levels...this deep sense of alienation is often misdiagnosed as apathy....Citizens don't vote becasue they have seen little evidence that their votes matter....I am convinced that people still yearn for a sense of community and want to contribute to the greater good...it [has to do] with rediscovering democracy. (p. 18, 19) Now this resonates with me. Much is ballyhooed in the press about Canadian apathy at the pollls. If politicians want to see greater voter turnout, more work has to be done between elections to convince citizens that their involvement counts. It seems to me that this strikes closest to home, close to home. This means potholes, graffitti, community revitalization. This means listening and engaging people in a meaningful way. No lip service.

Whose decision was it to treat the community of Southeast Seattle as second class?..We discussed the growing drug and gang problem and concluded that the city had already tried nearly every solution that money could buy. Affordable housing was amajor neighborhood issue, but there was little the city could do, especially when the state legislature had outlawed rent control. Likewise, the city had no jurisdiction over the schools...Traffic congestion and inadequate parking were equally perplexing. I quickly realized that public officials felt as powerless to address these issues as did the citizens (p. 27). Again, resonating. Which takes us back to the foundation of the book; asset based community development. Any one of us can be terrified in to inaction when trying to handle the beast that is bureaucracy. Instead of focusing on the failures, however, why not take an inventory of our assets and build from those?

McKnight told me about his friend who is a duck hunter. The friend has different kinds of calls for different kinds of ducks. Organizations, McKnight said, should do the same thing, adding that "too often the only call that organizations use is the loon call, and then they wonder why only the loons turn out for the meetings." For organizers, as for duck hunters, a variety of calls is essential. Some people will answer the call to rally around a particular issue. Some will turn out for work parties or to pitch in on a particular project in their neighborhood. Others will be attracted by a dance or a festival or by freshly baked brownies. The more calls an organization uses, the more broadly based its membership will be. And the more broadly based the membership, the more power the organization will have to address whatever issues matter most to its members. I knew it. Bring food. I wonder, what is with all these afternoon meetings? Are working people excluded? Perhaps for the Clareview Crime Council sake, we need to team up with other groups in our community to get a broader based plan on how to spend the $10,000. Maybe we need a party, and everyone is invited.

Fighting Crime

It's been a crazy-busy week. Work absorbed, which I think I've talked enough about now. But also I've been busy with condo board stuff. Sharlene and I both attended the Clareview Crime Council meeting to learn more about what can be done about crime in our neighbourhood.

Sharlene and I attended because there is a fair bit of petty crime activity in our back parking lot. Cars are broken in to or stolen. Shady deals are passed between cars with darkened windows. So we went to this session to learn more about what is available. Unbeknownst to us, the meeting was also a recruitment drive. We're both signed up. *sigh*. Ah, well. If it proves too much, I can always bow out.

But wow, so much we learned in that hour and a half. There's all sorts of crime prevention associations out there. There's all kinds of resources available, too. I got a phone number for "report a drug house". We can get a "safety audit" done for our property. There's a Coalition of Crime Councils. I met social worker who works in our neighbourhood. There's Safe Streets and Neighbourhood Empowerment Teams and Safe Edmonton (this looks good).

There's an expert on Neighbourhood Empowerment, Jim Diers who will be coming to town to speak on November 17, 2009. He has a book and now I am eager to hear from him in person. I bet a lot of what he talks about ties in to my ponderings on how we can humanize intake experiences.

It all comes down to people, doesn't it? Why haven't I heard of all these councils, resources and associations? Is it because I had bought in to the apathy and assumed there is nothing that can be done?

By the way, as I browsed the internet to confirm links above, I found InformAlberta.ca. It appears to be a self managed site to link all sorts of services in a mega-database The Safe Streets link was bad. The "contact us" form was markedly worse, consisting of over a hundred fields to review, two tabs, and obscure instructions...in red. God help me if I filled out the inquiry wrong. Will the internet police be after me soon?

Oh, and I should mention that the Clareview Crime Council provided FOOD and COFFEE. Coffee was compliments of our local Mac's owner, who recognized me and greeted me as I came in. It is heartening that he is so involved in our community.