(upbeat music) - Welcome to community connection.

I'm your host, Shelley Irwin, looking forward to this opportunity.

We're gonna get right into it with neighborhood associations around West Michigan.

So joining me today is Barbara Drawn of Heritage Hill Association.

Good work that you do.

Hanna Schulze of Garfield Park Neighborhood Association.

Hanna, thank you for you.

Let's move to Chai Benedict of West Grand Neighborhood Association.

Hello to you, Chai.

Daniel Drent, Heartside Downtown Neighborhood Association, doing great things, and Marquis Childers, of Muskegon Heights Neighborhood Association, Council Marquis, thanks for you.

And the work that you do.

So here we are, we could have probably had 20 faces on the screen, but we'll start with you and your associations.

Daniel, take it away.

Give us your 1O1s and how you're involved.

- I am the co-chair for the Heartside Downtown Neighborhood Association.

We are one of the newer neighborhood associations in the city of Grand Rapids.

Although we have a long history and I say newer because the former organization disbanded about 15 years ago and about seven years ago now, we regrouped in part because of the Heartside Quality of Life study to form the neighborhood association to make sure our residents had a voice in the community.

- Great, Barbara, share your story.

- I'm the executive director of the Heritage Hill Association.

I've been there for about two years and we've been established as an association since 1968.

So we've got lots of history and lots of, a great future ahead of us as well.

- All right, Hanna.

- Thanks for having me, Shelley, I'm here representing Garfield Park Neighborhood Association.

We are located on the Southeast side of Grand Rapids and we have been around for quite some time and have some incredible leadership and a long line of great work behind us.

So just it's a pleasure to be here with you all.

- Great Marquis.

- Hey, thanks for having me Shelley I'm here as the chairman of Muskegon Heights Neighborhood Association council, and we've been established since 2019, so we're fairly new here, but the beauty in that is that we have all of our, we have representation in each part of the city and we brought them together to form a council of amongst residents and just bringing that social connection and trust in our community.

- Great, Chi, tell us about you.

- Hi, I'm chi.

I'm from West Grand Neighborhood Organization.

We, I, my functioning title is crime prevention organizer, but I also do social media website, management for West Grand, a lot of community engagement.

We work primarily out of the West Grand neighborhood in Grand Rapids.

- Great, great.

Let me expand with the question for you all and then we'll leap around as they say, what does the Association's responsibility specifically you and perhaps a bit more of your geography and a challenge that you may be facing?

I'll start with you Barbara.

- Oh, well, first of all, our geography is generally to the north.

It's a Crescent street Northeast to the south that would be Pleasant avenue or pleasant street, Southeast, and to the East it would be union avenue and to the West, it's kind of a jagged line, but Lafayette Jefferson Prospect avenue, it's kind of a jagged edge.

And as far as what we are set up to do, our mission or our driving force is to engage citizens, give them a voice in their own future and making sure that they have a neighborhood that they feel safe and secure.

And for us, it's a little bit more, a little bit unusual in that we also have an added goal of making sure that it's an historically preserved neighborhood.

So that's the goal and geography of Heritage Hill.

- Great, wat would be a challenge in your world.

- In our world and in my role as executive director, I'm in kind of the lead on engaging those citizens.

And one of the challenges in the recent past is connectivity.

Even without COVID, but including COVID keeping neighbors, technology is great, but it also can be isolating.

A lot of people used to have block clubs back in the 80s and things like that and get together physically talk about safety issues, socialize, things like that.

That still happens sometimes organically, but so many people have taken that online, which is great and convenient, but especially in a neighborhood like ours.

And I know a lot of my colleagues on the screen and elsewhere around the city, not everyone in our neighborhood has connectivity either they don't have it, or they're not members of the social media groups that are common or they work three jobs.

They just don't have time to be on noon and figuring out things.

So it's connectivity is a challenge.

It's, there's a lot of opportunity, but there's a lot of hurdles to.

- Yes, Marquis, who do you serve and give and share a challenge if you would?

- Well, our location is Muskegon Heights, which is right by Mona lake off Seaway dry.

So we have the the whole city, which is not so big.

It's like a good thing too, right?

Our thing is to address concerns that's important to the residents, not so much.

It's all about residents everything is resident driven grassroots and it's to empower residents or inspire our residents to then empower themselves through that social connection and the understanding and addressing those concerns together rather than being individuals and to build community.

So when we address those concerns, it's not, it's a complaint.

It's more of, hey, we wanna work with you, businesses, cities, organizations.

And I would say the challenge in that is just, it's a continuing challenge, right?

Is to build trust amongst community residents and community resources, as far as your local agencies, organizations.

And it's just the stigma of how systems work and, just trying to meet the residents where they are.

I think that's the big thing.

And just bringing those different entities into the backyard of the residents.

So the residents could feel comfortable in addressing those concerns versus we have to go to city hall and do it.

Nobody wants to be that uncomfortable Unless you are like an activist.

So really just making sure that we can get those voices that, probably Wednesday much, but we can get it out of them if they have the home court advantage for to say, so that's been a challenge there.

And of course COVID has been a big one, so yeah.

- Thank you, Hannah, what do you share?

- Oh gosh, so Garfield Park Neighborhood Association is one of the biggest in the city of Grand Rapids.

We're located on the Southeast side of town to spare the real minute details, 28th street, Eastern 131 and the Cottage Grove area.

So we've got a pretty about 5,000 households, a little over 5,000 households in the Neighborhood Association.

And echoing what my colleagues said, a lot of what we do is getting information into the hands of our community members in a way that is gonna be relevant to their lives.

Is gonna help break down some of those barriers to accessing resources that either the city provides or other community organizations provide.

We have a good number of our neighbors, about 50% of our neighbors are Latino.

And so we have many folks who don't speak English as a first language.

So making sure that information is accessible in multiple languages and across multiple cultures and barriers and those barriers as well.

And the, our main challenges, again, very similar to what my colleagues are saying, but a lot of folks that don't have access to the internet.

So that connectivity piece is key.

We are fortunate to have a very tight knit community.

So we saw a lot of folks, especially early on in COVID kind of knocking on doors.

Hey, do you need grocery drop-off to some older neighbors or individuals who might disabled or otherwise not have access.

The Neighborhood Association was also able to help address some housing insecurity and food insecurity needs during the time with direct cash payments, through a grant that we received.

So just kind of meeting the needs in the moment and seeing what we can do to support our community is sort of our main goal.

But all that type of grassroots organizing, is really challenging as all of my colleagues have already stated so.

- I'm watching all the heads bob, in the backseat here, Daniel, what do you share with us?

- The Heartside Downtown Neighborhood Association our boundaries are would be nice if they were a nice square blocks, but they're not.

The easiest one is to the west is the river to the north, basically Michigan.

And then we share those boundaries with the Heritage Hill Neighbors Association to the east.

So basically Lafayette and then just the South Wealthy.

But then we also extend for a couple of blocks to Logan street past Wealthy the Western side of that.

As far as challenges that we deal with, we have probably three of our biggest challenges is one is to a lot of people were recognized only as a business district, not necessarily a neighborhood, even though we have, over 7,000 residents who live in the area.

The second thing is we have a huge disparity between economic levels, from our neighbors who are experiencing homelessness or being unhoused all the way up to those people who make, six figures a year.

So we represent a wide range of that.

The other thing is our ability to connect as neighbors because we all live in multiunit buildings.

And most of those buildings have a key holder that are the ones that allow us in or not in to that community to spread our message.

So working to build that relationship among everybody can be a challenge sometimes.

- Thank you Daniel.

Tell me more about you Chi.

- West Grand Neighborhoods boundaries or the city limits to the north bridge street to the south, the river on the east and Bristol Walker and valley on the west.

We're also one of the larger Neighborhood Associations in the city.

I would like to think of us as the 211 for our neighborhood.

We work with neighbors and businesses on crime prevention, neighborhood leadership opportunities, and also provide information and resources to neighbors that can help them navigate through things that are impacting them.

We hold events in our neighborhood and partner with many different organizations to do that.

As far as challenges in the last two years, of course, COVID-19 was our biggest.

- Let me come back to you, Barbara events that heritage your organization association does on an annual basis?

- We run a home tour every year.

We've had it for 50 years, but of course, during COVID, we did have to cancel the prior two years, but we're optimistic this year and we're running forward with the third weekend in May.

We do, we're gonna, we're shooting to do our annual home tour, which draws people from around the Midwest.

We also do a garden tour.

So we're excited to bring that back again.

And then we also do walking tours.

We've, partner with a professional guide who helps you run some tours for us, for neighbors and friends of Heritage Hill.

We do an annual picnic and annual holiday party.

So lots of ways we're trying to engage and get to know our neighbors.

- Great, let me bring go back to you, Daniel, on any events that a Heartside is particularly proud of or wants us to be involved in?

- Well, one of the biggest things that we did pre COVID is we had a monthly potluck, which gathered all the neighbors together, an opportunity to break bread, because we know that's a great way to connect with people and talk about updates and events, things happening in the community, concerns gather their information that way.

We also with Dwelling Place and Aquinas College had sponsored a clean sweep for the Heartside Neighborhood every spring.

And then we've also been doing, taking part in the national night out programs in late summer to build community and relationships that way.

- Great Marquis, what can we put on our calendar for your organization, your association?

- We also do the a night out event.

That's a pretty good thing, that's a great thing.

We also participate in our local festivals here, as far as the Juneteenth celebration that happens in the summer and as well as our Muskegon Heights festival in the park, we have that, that has that's happening in the mid July, but other than that, our neighborhood, so I have six neighborhood associations and each of them are individuals.

So they all have their own individual celebration.

Some have block parties, some have fish fries.

It's just depending on their, how they're feeling at that time.

And what I do is I participate into the things that they're doing and invite community out into, come into their place.

So I don't have the specific dates.

I do know with Juneteenth, it would be the Saturday of like the 18th and with the festival and the part we looking at the middle of July.

So hopefully we can have it with the COVID thing so.

- Yep, day at a time, Hannah, talk to me more about the events that you'd like to be associated with.

- Sure, Garfield park has tried to host pop-up events every couple of weeks.

Some of them are centered around accessing resources for mental health and physical health care.

Some have been educational for access to vaccines and COVID treatment.

So we also participate in national night, out in October.

Typically it's an October.

Sometimes they changed the date around and we often host a weekly story time in the park, in the summers, every tuesday for free books and ice cream, for families in the neighborhood, other and other fun events.

One thing I'm really excited about is in 2019, we worked really hard to fundraise, to create a splash pad in at Garfield park.

Historically, there has been a water feature in the park, but many years ago, it kind of went on, kind of went to funk, I guess, that fell apart.

And so we fund we've made a huge effort to fundraise.

And so because of COVID, all the construction has been delayed, but we're gonna be starting construction on our water feature for Garfield park in the spring of 2022.

So by next summer, when things get kicked off, then families will have a place to cool off in the summertime so we're really excited.

The best place to find all of our information is gonna be GPNHGR.org.

- Great, it will be warm again, as they say.

- Someday.

- Same question to you regarding West Grand Chi.

And then I would like you to be specific about your job in the area of crime, if you would.

- Okay, we do events like the west side community cleanup, which we're going through planning right now.

We work with other organizations to put that on the kind of clean up the west side of the Grand Rapids first word area.

And then we do national night out and we have also worked with partners on blood drives.

COVID testing, that sort of thing.

Our engagement activities include door to door, work, phone, social media, email, little bit of everything because that's, you gotta go where your residents are to meet with them.

So you got to do a little bit of everything to get to them.

Now, as far as crime prevention, we usually work with neighbors.

If, say they're having an issue involving crime, we can provide tips, resources, help them kind of figure out ways to come up with a solution to the issue which may or may not involve the police.

Sometimes it's just prevention.

Sometimes it's talking to your neighbor about something or talking to a landlord about an issue that you're having with the household or whatnot.

So it just depends on what the issue is really on what advice you're going to give or ex kind of resources you're going to give.

So it can be a little bit of everything on that too.

And usually it's multifaceted issue.

So it's not, it might not just be crime, but it also might be an affordable housing issue.

It, might be a landlord tenant issue that turned into a crime issue.

So if you're kind of working to triage what those issues are to find the best solution for the neighbor or plug them in to where they need to go.

- Great, will anyone else like to respond to a well crime prevention or are there still neighborhood watches out there?

Am I watching out for my neighbor, Hannah?

Go ahead, Barbara, yeah.

- Oh yeah, we, same thing.

Neighborhood, a neighborhood is different what the crime, what the crime of the day is whatever.

But I think we share with not only the city and Heritage Hill, but the country, the reports are that car break-ins are just off the hooks.

I can look back reports from my colleagues and my peers in the 1980s.

And they were, it's just never stopped.

But car break-ins are just off the racks this year.

And last year was I had enough due to COVID, but so we've done.

We partnered with the GRPD, the police department to fly or some hotspots through the neighborhood, either in our neighborhood and joining your hotspots, so to join and impact our neighborhood and that effort alone to target those hotspots was an immediate relief and car break in.

Just educating residents to lock your doors, lock your car doors.

That's the biggest problem.

Really the biggest problem just lock your car doors.

So educating people to lock their doors and keep stuff out of there.

Keep the temptation down.

So we've seen a huge decrease just as a result of educating our neighbors on something like that.

- What about the topic of raising dollars?

What are you doing in this venue, Daniel?

How are you keeping your association afloat?

- I had a wing and a prayer current like we, because we're a new association, we had to go through and set up all of our board rules and regulations and submit all that stuff to get our non-profit status.

And because of COVID that has basically hit a dead end.

So we're, even though we're officially functioning, we're not technically a nonprofit at this time.

So we haven't really had the ability to do some fundraising.

We've gotten some support through DGRI downtown Grand Rapids.

The other thing is based on the rules and regulations, our neighborhood is not available for a lot of the federal funding that comes through the city through the CDBG grants.

So we're being creative and just looking for support wherever we can get it.

We did get the approval that we can actually open a checking account, even though we don't have our official non-profit status.

So we are gonna be actively seeking funds and starting to raise funds so we can do more programs from there.

But it's a challenge you have to follow the rules and regulations and it, if you don't have a checking account where you can deposit funds, then it's pretty hard to raise money.

So we're looking forward to that opportunity to start doing more.

- Great with five minutes left, I give you all then your final question, what's your big dream and how do we find out more information?

And I will start with you Daniel.

- I think our big dream is one to finally get our non-profit status that will really change what we're doing.

And our dream is just to be able to build this connection between all of our neighbors, that everybody feels comfortable, everybody feels welcome, and we can have open and as communications just to make it a better neighborhood than what it already is.

- Great, best website?

- Intheheartofgr.org, if I remember correctly, otherwise we have a Facebook page also.

- Of course, Hannah Schulze, what will you leave us with?

- I will just say, GPNA deals with a lot of similar issues.

I think our dream right now is to keep an eye on the displacement and gentrification.

That's negatively impacting our neighborhood.

We have a hugely hot real estate market, particularly on the south side of Grand Rapids.

And it is causing a lot of fear and concern, particularly with our neighbors of lower income and our neighbors of color.

And because our neighborhood is so diverse, we need to be extremely intentional about the ways that we're watching development happen.

So our, my dream is just to keep plugging away at that and be able to work with wonderful people like you all, all the time to, to make our communities better.

And like I said, our neighborhood association website is GPNAGR.org.

So check us out, appreciate it.

- Great, thank you for that.

Marquis Childers, what do you leave us with?

- Just taking him back right off Hannah's point with gentrification, my thing is how a dream goal is how we can get the residents to actually be a part of the change.

So if there's, if becoming with new business, can they get the jobs?

Are they able to then make the wages where we're not lower income, but they have livable wages.

So if you build that $100,000 house, they can purchased the house 'cause they would make the money to make those choices for themselves, right?

And not living in distress.

And that had been bring the community together with community partners in residence.

And that is my dream there.

And reach us in muskegonheightsstrong.com.

- Alright, thank you, Marquis for you.

What do you leave us with Chai Benedict?

- Yeah, I guess my big dream, I would say for my neighborhood, not just the association would be to see more things come into the community for our neighbors that are needed, like affordable housing that has the majority of my calls.

The majority of my calls to my office are where can I find some affordable housing?

So I would like to see there some better advocacy with the state on that.

And we need neighbors to do that because there's only so many dollars out there for affordable housing.

And I think if we truly want more affordable housing state advocacy has to happen on that.

Additionally I guess the big, the even bigger dream was, that maybe we work ourselves to a point where we don't actually need us.

- Yeah, nice.

- Wouldn't that be the dream?

- That would be.

- You're right, what's your best website?

- We can have communities that need us.

So westgrand.org is where you can find us and we also have Facebook, so definitely reach out.

- Reach that dream.

Barbara, what do you leave us with lastly?

- Oh, I think that Heritage Hill just wants to be a safe, secure, stable neighborhood where people wanna live, work and play and we wanna be a happy partner, a good partner with the city and its longterm master plan for the next 20 years and make sure that we can be a resource for stable housing and things like that.

That some of my colleagues had mentioned we're @heritagehillweb.org or on Facebook, we're @heritagehill.

- Great, well continue communicating between yourselves and we're all part of West Michigan and dreams can often come true.

So thank you for you and representing your neighborhoods with these great associations and well we'll continue the conversations thank to you all.

And of course, thank you for watching this edition of Community Connection.

Get involved in your neighborhood.

Thank you for watching.

- [Instructor] If your organization would like to be considered for a community connection segment, email your information to irwinsh@gvsu.edu.

(upbeat music)