Working out our differences one block at a time

I’ve been thinking lately about the role that organized neighborhood groups might play in countering the tendency these days to isolate ourselves in like-minded communities while resisting engagement with those outside our bubbles.

In Lansing’s heterogenous neighborhoods, organized groups have frequently functioned to bring people of very different backgrounds and opinions together to focus on not-too-controversial shared concerns.  Typical issues are potholes, sidewalk conditions, beautification projects, noise issues and safety concerns. Perhaps even more important, these gatherings allow folks to get to know their neighbors, building a sense of connection, whatever their political stripes.

Organized neighborhoods have been a huge asset to Lansing for over half a century, contributing to its friendly-city reputation. Historically, neighborhood groups have benefited from a backbone institution that provides practical and often financial support for neighborhood improvement activities. In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, city government created 15 Model Neighborhoods as part of Lansing Model Cities. A creation of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Model Cities brought millions of dollars into urban communities, including Lansing. Amazingly, decisions about dispersal of these funds fell to the Model Cities Policy Board, composed mostly of residents of the low-to-moderate-income Model Neighborhoods, the inner ring of near downtown neighborhoods that we today call Old Town, northwest Lansing, the east side and the near south side.

Lansing’s Model Cities program had a huge impact, resulting in amenities we enjoy today, such as Lansing’s solid waste pick-up, more robust bus services, a dispersed network of public health clinics, the Eastside Neighborhood Organization and the Westside Neighborhood Association.  Model Cities helped establish an enduring social infrastructure whose leaders applied the organizing and planning skills developed while involved with Model Cities to a wide range of community building efforts. They’ve been at it now for a half-century.

The backbone organization supporting neighborhood capacity-building changed with the times. In the 1980s, it became the Lansing Police Department when MSU criminal justice Professor Robert Trojanovicz partnered with LPD to do research on community policing.  Officer Don Christy, the city’s first community police officer, eagerly took to eastside streets as a neighborhood problem solver and social worker. Paralleling community policing, LPD committed to building neighborhood watch groups, which number 45 active groups today. While initially these groups focused on crime prevention, most eventually embraced a broader agenda that included park improvements, beautification and social events like Neighbors Night Out.

In the 1990s, under the visionary leadership of Bruce Bragg, the Ingham County Health Department became that decade’s institutional backbone for neighborhood change. Inspired by the World Health Organization, the ICHD funded and helped facilitate geographically based  “healthy community” summits on the east, west and south sides, each addressing social determinants of health: housing, education, access to health, etc. These summits, held at Eastern, Sexton and Eastern high schools, each drew about 300 people who came together to identify key areas of concern and strategies for improvement. The Health Department followed with “cultural summits,” including an African-American Health Summit and the Mestizo-Anishinabek Health Summit. All five summits produced a comprehensive action plan and an organization to implement it.

For instance, the Eastside Summit morphed into Allen Neighborhood Center, where “Growing in Community: A Plan for Lansing’s Eastside” became ANC’s strategic plan for its first five years. At the same time, Northwest Summit became the westside-based Northwest Initiative, and the plans coming out of the Southside Summit were taken up by South Lansing Community Development Association, Baker Donora Center and the Southside Community Center.  Though the Baker Donora and Southside Community centers no longer exist, SWAG (Southwest Action Group) and the Southside Community Coalition now serve south Lansing.

From its start, ANC built upon the already existing infrastructure of the east side with its 25 active neighborhood groups even while it worked to strengthen that infrastructure by offering capacity-building leadership workshops, fiduciary services, meeting space and, importantly, free copying services. (Distributing flyers in neighborhoods preceded social media as the essential communication tool for neighborhood groups.) Other centers routinely engaged with faith-based groups, businesses and neighborhood associations. And so, these nonprofits became the institutional backbones for their quadrants.

Over-arching citywide support

Concurrently, over this same 50 years, the Lansing Neighborhood Council emerged to provide technical support to the many small groups forming throughout Lansing. LNC began in the mid-late 80s, led by Susan Christian, who, along with other activists, were fresh from their work with the MI Housing Coalition, where they had opposed redlining and advocated for affordable housing. LNC’s earliest work was in public housing, which Christian saw as “neighborhoods to be organized, places to build leadership and get people talking with another to make life better in those developments.”

 While supported financially by city government, LNC answered to an independent board made up of representatives from neighborhood groups it served. REO Town pioneer Priscilla Holmes followed Christian and oversaw the Paint Blitz, which became a popular annual event in which neighbors painted dozens of houses around the city. Jennie Grau led LNC from 1993 to 1997, noting that “LNC leveraged relationships between neighborhood groups all across the city.  It also supported the establishment of smaller geographic communities to better ‘neighbor’ across smaller distances.”

This support helped to increase the number of neighborhood organizations served from 10 to 25, including Old Everett, Fabulous Acres, Eastfield, Oak Park Neighbors, Prospect Place.  After Grau, Cheryl Risner led LNC until it ended in 2014. At that time, Mayor Virg Bernero launched the Office of Neighborhood Engagement, which Mayor Andy Schor later elevated to the Department of Neighborhoods, Arts and Civic Engagement. For the first time, there would be someone in the mayor’s Monday morning cabinet meetings to bring a neighborhood lens to consideration of the full range of city issues. Of course, while this brought recognition of the importance of neighborhoods, the independent voice for small neighborhood groups faded.

Right now, the neighborhood space is filled with nonprofit entities and the city’s neighbohoods department. All of these focus on hosting community dialogues, delivering capacity-building programs, linking groups to resources and building the social infrastructure. 

While all of this is important work, it may be the little volunteer-led neighborhood groups that offer the most impactful opportunities for countering the divisiveness that is pervasive in our current culture. In their smaller meetings, clean-up days, block parties, flower-plantings, intersection-paintings and holiday gatherings, perhaps the small groups can provide real opportunities for people to share their history, concerns and experiences with neighbors who lean a different way politically. And maybe it’s also at this level that the conversations about emerging neighborhood issues should start, such as inclusive zoning to allow more diverse housing, reconsidering parking requirements, historic preservation and more. 

In my own small neighborhood, Prospect Place, the more mundane activities still count for a lot: watching out for one another’s kids and pets, swapping perennials, collecting mail and packages for out-of-towners, checking in on one another during weather emergencies, explaining the reasoning behind our particular yard signs and gathering for ice cream cones on a neighbor’s porch in the high heat of summer. These are the ways in which trust is built in neighborhoods — the next largest social unit past family. This kind of trust, built over time, just might be key to helping us broach the ideological differences that are playing out everywhere — at least for the block on which we live.

(Joan Nelson is retired  founding executive director of the Allen Neighborhood Center. She writes this column monthly.)