The Triumph of One Neighborhood at a Time
Written by Tim Buckley, July 2024
A compelling thing about Building Community Resilience (BCR) is the encouragement to put the priorities of those living in the most severely challenged neighborhoods at the top of the City’s “to do” list. To ensure that happens, those neighborhoods are given a megaphone, support, and a platform. Think about how uncommon that is! “Grass roots” neighbors achieving greater parity with the “grass tops” leaders. Real change begins to happen, not spare change.
In Salem and Keizer, CBEL’s BCR rollout is now in its fourth year, thanks to the Center for Community Excellence. The theoretical has become tangible: neighborhoods engaged in the CBEL project are experiencing more safety, increased social connections and unprecedented participation by neighbors in events sponsored by their Neighborhood Family Council (NFC). The mood changes with the movement. Hope has emerged from hopelessness.
The icing on BCR’s cake is normalized relationships between grass roots and grass tops leaders. Barriers are lowered. The “us and them” is merging. All that’s left is “us.”
Through that lens, the first Fun Friday event of 2024 was a good deal more than the head count (550+ people, a diversity of families). What shone through all the sharing of conversation, food, games, and the ever-popular raffle at the end of the evening was a community getting to know itself in a more peaceful, generous, healthy way.
Event coordinators came up with a wonderful strategy for encouraging socializing in a deeper way: the Fun Friday Passport. More than 40 organizations agreed to bring a table, chairs, resources, volunteers, and a willingness to meet and mingle with families arriving from the neighborhoods around Northgate Park. People attending the event took their “passport” to each resource table to be stamped. For each stamp collected, participants got a free raffle ticket.
Among the 40 organizations were city and county police, a dozen early childhood and educational groups, cultural organizations, environmental groups, financial organizations, public libraries, colleges, recreation organizations and health related groups.
But here’s the beauty…many of the resource people brought games and giveaways for those who stopped by. Naturally, this started conversation. Neighbors learned about resources available, and the organization learned about families. In the process of exchanging information and getting passports stamped, people began to form casual relationships, building a basis for trust and respect. Many of the organizations come back week after week, year after year. Many are now on a first-name basis with neighbors who also attend regularly.
Fun Fridays are an incubator for new acquaintances, a source of information to build family health and resilience, and a generator of good vibes that radiate in the hearts of attendees for days after the event. It demonstrates part of what author and Harvard educator Edward Glaeser calls “The Triumph of the City.” Despite challenges, CBEL and the Neighborhood Family Councils are showing how life in a densely populated area can become healthy, well educated, and financially self-sufficient.