building blocks, first week

*all names and places have been changed to protect the identity of the residents*
Building blocks is a grant program set up by the cisty of Kalamazoo and a class I am taking this quarter teaches organizing skills through facilitation of this program. What follows is an account of some of my experiences the first week:
After experiencing my group’s interactions with our supervisor at the training session, I realized I was going to have to speak up a lot more. Sarah and Sam both have really strong personalities and I felt like they really dominated our introductory conversation with Tom. At first I think I felt a little excluded because Sarah and Sam already knew each other quite well and tended to have very personal conversations to which I didn’t feel I could contribute much. On Sunday night, the night before our first actual meeting with Tom, I decided to make a conscious effort to make an equal contribution to our conversation. I planned out how I would respond to different scenarios and felt pretty confident, but the next day as I sat in Rocket Cafe trying to take a more active role in the conversation I remembered that planning is much easier than executing. Sarah and Sam were both sitting on the same side of the table so I changed where I was sitting so Tom didn’t have to look in a different direction to make eye contact with me and then I just started talking, even if occasionally I was interjecting something Sam or Sarah was saying. Although it was very awkward for me at first to have to work so hard to remain a part of the dialogue, by the end of our conversation, I felt like I was making an equal contribution with very little effort. I think that changing my seat at the table really helped.
Most of the dialogue at our meeting focused around the flier we would hand out in our neighborhood. I think we all thought the meeting would be pretty short because we were just going to construct a one-page flier. However, we ended up sitting at Rocket Cafe for a couple of hours and getting to know each other more between composing the flier. After much discussion about specific wording and formatting, we came up with a flier that I think we were all excited about. It allowed people to quickly discern the purpose of building blocks and the steps they would need to take to participate without overly emphasizing the monetary aspect. We learned a lot more about Tom at our meeting as well. He has been a supervisor several times for building blocks and participated in the program several years ago. Right now he is unemployed so he feels like he can spend a lot of time as the supervisor, but he is very concerned that we will agree to complete projects that cannot be completed during the work weekends and that he will ultimately end up finishing them himself after the work weekends. I think that because of his experience Tom will be a wonderful asset for us as challenges present themselves. However, Tom also is very clear about what he wont do. He really does not want to work on any eaves troughs nor does he want to support any projects in the back yards of houses. I think that his experience has caused him to be slightly less receptive to innovative ways of attacking problems.
During our meeting at Rocket Cafe, we came up with two days to go door-knocking in our neighborhood during the next week since we had to get our flier approved on Thursday at the neighborhood association meeting. Only one of the times would be before second week. However, after class on Monday night, we all agreed that we should add another session before our next class. We tentatively agreed that we would wait until after our third attempt at door-knocking together to go out to Bellaire St. individually. I was relieved that we were planning more than two door-knocking attempts because it seemed like we were waiting a long time to start the process and that we could easily fall behind schedule. I was also a little worried about Tom’s willingness to accompany us door-knocking. I wasn’t sure how much he planned on participating in our door-knocking and I didn’t think I would be comfortable with him talking to residents when we first met them because I understood that as my responsibility as a student. Sarah, Sam, and I decided that we would talk to Tom about guidelines when we me to start door-knocking.
On Thursday, we had a joint meeting with the neighborhood association and the other groups working in the Hoover neighborhood. The meeting was really helpful in clarifying some of the confusing aspects of the policies of Hoover’s neighborhood association. We learned an interesting lesson on classifying people, too: two Hoover residents at the neighborhood got in a pretty heated discussion about the ‘kinds of people’ that live in Hoover. In suggesting that we also identify ourselves as Kalamazoo College students, one resident generalized all Hoover residents as ‘poor and proud’ and thus not likely to accept handouts from wealthy donors in the city. She used herself as an example, saying that she initially participated in building blocks because she thought it would help her student organizers earn class credit. However, another person at the meeting corrected her, saying that many residents of Hoover are well-educated and not very poor and choose to live there because the like the homes and the proximity to downtown. It was interesting to listen to their conversation because they didn’t seem to want to acknowledge that both people could coexist in Hoover.
That afternoon, it was a really nice day outside and I was feeling guilty about not having seen Bellaire St. yet so I rode my bike to Hoover and made a couple of loops up and down the two blocks that encompass our site. Although it was a warm sunny day, it was also a weekday and one of the things that struck me the most was the number of people who were outside. The only residents I saw were African American and there were a lot of kids playing in the street. Tom told us on Monday that most of the houses were one-story bungalows so I wasn’t expecting as many two-story homes. A stream flows perpendicular to one end of the court, there was one empty lot near the stream and many of the homes close to the stream were for sale. The top story of one of the homes on that block had burned in a fire and no one appeared to live there. The site was a lot more beautiful than I had expected it to be; the homes possessed a friendly character, I think because they were all close to the street, and the atmosphere on the street seemed more friendly than the atmosphere on Reed, the street I rode in on. I left the neighborhood really excited about door-knocking on Saturday.
Saturday afternoon we met Tom in the Hardings parking lot a block away from our site. We were all really embarrassed about arriving late, but Tom was very understanding; apparently he was late, too but had the good fortune to arrive a few minutes before us. To our surprise, before we could talk about the guidelines we wanted to set for door-knocking, Tom made it clear that he was just there to walk down the street and that he would not be talking to the residents. As we were walking to one end or Bellaire St. to start knocking on doors, we were stopped by Greg and Grant in between their two houses. They asked us what we were up to so we decided to talk to them first. I was caught off guard a little so I sort of fumbled my way through an explanation of building blocks but they were both kind enough to listen to me. Between jokes about the huge additions they wanted to add to their already massive houses, they told us they were very interested in the program. Their homes seemed to be the center of much of the activity in the neighborhood and their were several kids playing basketball in front of their homes. It turned out that Greg doesn’t actually live on Bellaire St. but that his two kids, Lashonda and a young boy, do. Grant lives with his mom in the house next door and they seemed to be pretty good friends. They also seemed to be pretty knowledgeable about their neighbors on Bellaire St. and were telling us about the people who lived around them. One of the first things I noticed was their view toward Hispanics. As we were knocking on another door, someone yelled to Sarah and me, “Some Mexicans live there, I don’t think they’re home”. I guess it wasn’t the comment itself but rather the way they emphasized Mexicans that made me take a second look at the block. Everyone who was outside was African American, even though Hoover has a reputation of having a large Hispanic population. As we continued knocking on doors, we met several Hispanic households, some with children, but they all stayed safely inside their houses. Javier and Jose came outside to talk with us but refused to leave their porch as we talked about possible landscaping projects. I noticed the same trend with the few Caucasian families we met. Julie, an elderly Caucasian woman, invited us inside her home to talk before she even knew who we were. Between the squeaks of her rabbit, the squawking of her bird and the soft spinning of her hamster’s wheel; she lamented that her grandchildren used to play outside all the time but that a long time ago the kids moved away and new people moved in and now she doesn’t really go outside anymore. She has two grandchildren who live with her as well and who are close in age to many of the kids we saw playing in the street but when her great-grandson did venture outside on his bike, he didn’t seem to want to interact with any of the kids who were already playing. From our conversation with Margaret, it seems like there may have been a large change in the racial composition of the neighborhood in the last 30 years or so from predominantly Caucasian to predominantly Hispanic and African American.
Sunday afternoon, Sarah, Sam and I headed back to Bellaire St., this time without Tom. There were people we needed to meet for the first time and others we needed to give more information to. As we began to walk down the street, Andrew ran up to us to say hello. We only managed to knock on one door before we were again drawn to Grant and Greg’s homes. This time, we met May Greg, Greg’s mom and the owner of the home where Greg’s kids live. She was very excited about the prospect of getting help to improve her yard as well as getting to know the few neighbors she has not already met. Every car that drove past Bellaire St. while we chatted with May somehow contained passengers who were related to her. She has met almost everyone on the block, although she doesn’t know many of their names. May seems like a very valuable resource because she is so well connected in the neighborhood. She was able to tell us the daily schedules of most of our neighbors and offered to give them fliers and talk about the program when she saw them. Despite the length of time we spent with May, we were unable to divulge any broader issues that she was worried about with her neighborhood because of how distracted she was with visitors. We are going to talk with her more on Tuesday and hopefully we will be able to have a more personal conversation with her. We knocked on the door of the next house on our list an again no one answered. We were about to give up when Sarah noticed some people working in the backyard. After we explained who we were to a teenage boy we met an amazing woman, Janet. It turned out that Janet actually lives on Bank St. and is planning on participating in building blocks in that site. Through our conversation, we discovered that she has epilepsy and MS, and possibly some other serious illnesses. Her husband is currently unemployed because he injured his hands and although they get workers compensation, they have $175 each month to live on after they pay for the rent on their house. They also have 8 children. Because her top priority is caring for her children, Janet has not been able to afford her medication for the past three days and is in a lot of pain. Despite this, she is spending the afternoon with her kids working in her neighbor’s yard. She mentioned her illnesses and the fact that she has no refrigerator, microwave or oven and only two functional burners on her stove casually; as side notes. What she was really worried about was finishing her work on her neighbor’s yard before she was in too much pain to continue. Inspired by Aditi’s visit yesterday, she had started cleaning her yard; an effort that quickly expanded into other yards as well. I was really amazed at how intent Janet was on maintaining her social capital with her neighbors in the face of the extreme financial challenges she is facing.