A Community Effort

Until recently, few people took the half-hour drive from downtown, past the neighborhoods of restored Victorians, flower shops and corner Starbucks, across the Willamette, up the rise from the lush and stately mansions of Reed College, to Outer Southeast.

Here, the city’s friendly funkiness gave way to muddy, unpaved streets, barking dogs and what folks in this area call shade-tree mechanics who fix old cars on their lawns. Some knew the poor, 95% white neighborhood only as Felony Flats, a reference to the number of parolee residents, an “urban Appalachia,” a place where the dropout rate was the highest in the city, the income the second lowest and where distrust was as much a part of the landscape as the constant drizzle. In Outer Southeast, some neighbors still install wire fences on top of their wood fences.

But now, the once-forgotten neighborhood is beginning to blossom. Annexation nudged the city into building some streets, sidewalks and sewers, and a flurry of grass-roots activity is drawing people out of their houses and into the mainstream.

Specifically, local attention has focused on a group of women meeting in a cramped office down on 52nd Avenue across from the Moose Lodge. A plastic sign in the window announces, “Neighborhood Pride Team,” and then, “Empower. Educate. Encourage.” Inside, single mothers who once stayed home watching TV are teaching their neighbors how to use computers. Women who have had trouble with drugs and the law are learning leadership at corporate board meetings. Timid divorced women or abandoned girlfriends pushed off welfare are learning how to start businesses.

Pride team computer teacher Connie Christenson, a thrice-divorced single mother who has struggled to keep a job, says what she found there changed her view of herself, her neighbors and her prospects. “You spend years thinking you’re nothing and you don’t have any thoughts or ideas that people want to hear. It feels like all of a sudden you have something to give.”

In an era of welfare reform and retreat by the federal government, many political and philanthropic leaders are pinning their hopes on such grass-roots, community-based organizations to help even the most disenfranchised people solve a multitude of social problems.

“There is recognition, more than there used to be, that we don’t have the ability to change it for them,” said Lynn Knox, a community relations specialist for Portland’s Bureau of Housing and Community Development. “We may be able to change things with them, or they may be able to change it with some assistance. But they’ve got to be in the driver’s seat or nothing important will really happen.”

Enthusiasm is also growing for the community organizing approach used by the team members--a positive “asset-building” strategy that focuses on finding strengths to be built, not problems to be fixed.

“People are sick of being in despair and saying nothing is going to change,” said Don Neureuther, director of funding for Portland’s Neighborhood Partnership Fund, which has supported the pride team. “Portland and every other city is littered with top-down failures. This is a great example of the bottom-up approach.”

Social scientists call it building “social capital,” the blend of civic engagement and mutual trust they believe accounts for lawfulness and a vigorous civil society.

Several researchers have cited a drastic decline in social capital over the last generation. In the past three decades, levels of trust have declined precipitously in the U.S., University of Minnesota political scientist Wendy Rahn told the National Commission on Civic Renewal this year. From 1960 to 1995, Americans who said they could generally trust most people dropped from 55% to 35%. Even lower levels were registered by the young and minorities.

Outer Southeast faces the same vexing issues as many communities that need to increase the skills of poor women at the same time welfare reform is throwing them into the job market. But the area is unique in its relative isolation and lack of diversity.

White poverty has its own little-understood problems, Knox said. “If you’re white, you’re assumed to have the same advantages as everybody else. So there’s something wrong with you if you can’t make a good living,” she said. “It’s what gives rise, in many cases, to the outlaw mentality. At least with the men.”

And looking around, the founders of the Neighborhood Pride Team saw women beaten too low--by poor expectations, early pregnancies, abuse, depression, divorce and widowhood--to be readily employable or able to find meaningful work.

The level of despair in such neighborhoods is greater than many imagine. Simply providing computer classes for these women wouldn’t be enough, said Phyllis Shelton, the team’s operations manager. “Anyone can go to [Portland Community College] and take a computer class,” she said. “For whatever reason, this group needed to build their self-esteem to believe they were worthy of going to PCC to take a computer class.”

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The Neighborhood Pride Team began when Molly Cooley started knocking on doors for a county HIV prevention program called Women to Women.

Cooley, a longtime activist and former junior high art teacher, was walking the streets of Outer Southeast looking for women to come to parties and form a network to pass out health literature. A nearby resident, she was well aware that few would ever come to a program that a government worker said they needed. “Nobody walks into nothing out here,” she said. “You have to go to their house, invite them personally and go with them to the first thing, usually.”

Tousled and simply dressed, Cooley fit right in. Credited by officials with a “quirky charisma,” Cooley, 53, had been to graduate school, but she had also taught herself to speak the way seventh-graders write.

Watching her, Christenson was suspicious. A descendant of John Paul Jones and Mormon pioneers, Christenson had lived the best part of three decades in Outer Southeast. A former teen mother and high school dropout, she was now spending most of her days sitting at home reading or watching TV.

When she saw outsiders, she thought they might be involved with drugs. Or the government. Or they might be “educated” people who would intimidate her. After a few visits, though, Christenson and Cooley became friends. It would be years before Christenson realized Cooley was “educated.”

By the summer of 1994, Cooley recalled, “A bunch of us were meeting for that and someone said, ‘I want to do more, make life better for kids in the neighborhood. Why can’t we call ourselves the Neighborhood Pride Team?’ Everyone just yelled, ‘Yay!’ ”

Over the next year, Cooley said, the women spent their meetings learning to work together, designing a logo and defining their mission (“to create permanent social change by increasing employability of the residents and the economic viability of the neighborhoods”). The next year, they became an official community development corporation, a nonprofit group, with 60 members, ages 12 to 86, serving on a rotating board of directors.

Community development corporations arose in the 1960s to encourage business in low-income neighborhoods, but most have tended to focus on building affordable housing. Recognizing the need to move beyond “bricks and mortar,” some CDCs now focus on crime prevention, child and health care, and other social issues by strengthening neighborhood networks.

The Neighborhood Pride Team was ignited by the “asset-based community development” strategies popularized by John McKnight, director of community studies at Northwestern University’s Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research.

A student of the late organizer Saul Alinsky, McKnight has helped move community organizing beyond the standard approach of galvanizing neighbors to demand services from local government and more toward building a mutual help network of their own.

According to McKnight, researchers and the media typically see older, low-income neighborhoods as places for people with problems, pathologies and needs. “If you picked the four lowest-income neighborhoods in L.A., [researchers] will be able to tell you what the teenage pregnancy rate is, the drug addiction situation, the dilapidated housing quantified. If you said, ‘Give me some data about the families that have successfully negotiated raising their children in the neighborhood, organizations that are doing something to support you, women’s groups that are working in ways that keep girls from becoming pregnant,’ they won’t know.”

His strategy focuses on community leaders assessing their own strengths and building on them. McKnight said his ideas have spread to 800 neighborhoods in 20 cities--mostly in the East or Midwest. Some inner-city neighborhoods have reported stunning revitalization results, particularly in older areas in Boston and Chicago, which already have strong ties. Results in the suburbs are less certain.

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In early 1995, pride team members read McKnight’s article “The Future of Low Income Neighborhoods and the People Who Reside in Them,” and warmed to his belief that the poor are more qualified to solve their problems than “outside experts” who treat them as clients and cases.

“As McKnight says, we do not need to support a class of social worker,” Cooley said. “We need to be mentoring and teaching each other and sharing gifts. Social workers are going to go out of business. That’s the plan, anyway.”

The team works closely with other new organizations supported by reallocated welfare funds: the ROSE Community Development Corp., which provides housing and child care, and Southeast Works, a work force development program.

That same year, the group received a $5,000 grant for local initiatives and conducted a “capacity inventory” with official surveys from McKnight’s center. They interviewed 115 neighbors about their gifts, skills and dreams.

“We tried to get people talking to their neighbors,” Cooley said. “People who had never done any work for money went out and did that. And they really liked it. It also gave them a chance to talk to their neighbors and ask questions they were too shy to ask otherwise.”

The women found quilters, infant care experts, cooks and an abundance of talented gardeners. The information was entered into a databank. Members are starting to work with another organization to use the assets in a barter system called Time Traders.

Because the survey showed that many were interested in learning computer skills, the women sought out grants, donations and volunteers to open the office. Christenson, who had never learned to type and who struggled for years to hold down a job, learned computer skills and now teaches beginning computer to others 10 hours a week for pay. She has a business card that announces her as the skills center coordinator.

She served on the board and studied leadership. She put on a pantsuit she had in her closet and went downtown to meet with the elite philanthropists. She applied for and received a minor promotion as manager of her apartment complex.

Other members said they’ve benefited practically and emotionally from joining the team.

Through the entrepreneurial class, Marilyn Cobo, 62, recently struck with a severe muscular illness and separated from her husband, has made a business plan for her Frugal Person’s Earth Friendly Bed and Breakfast. A master gardener, she also took charge of landscaping 10 new homes developed by the ROSE CDC.

Several members have picked up work. Cobo, for instance, works part time enrolling neighbors in Time Traders.

Vi Bryant, a mother of twins who is recovering from a drug problem, said she became aware of her own leadership qualities through the team. “I’m persistent,” she said. “I bring up good ideas. I get real passionate--especially about Time Traders. I love to call people and see what they’re doing.”

The group rallied around Bryant, 37, when she started using drugs again and was arrested for felony possession. Now, she’s back volunteering at the center as part of her probation. When a pastor called in to see what he could do, he ended up hiring her two days a week as a janitor.

If members’ accomplishments seem small, the pride team has cleared the first and most important hurdle, McKnight said. “What those women have done to move from thinking of themselves as nobodies who can’t do ‘nothing’ to discovering their capacities and beginning to vocalize them, is a classic example of the threshold over which groups must come--and do come if they’re going to be able to really build their community.”

This spring, Cooley is relatively assured of raising $95,000 in grant funds to pay a staff of four, cover the rent and run the entrepreneur program.

But as they attract outside attention and money, the women are facing tough, new questions: How much do they want to grow? Should men be invited to join the board? How much do they need to listen to the outside consultants required by funders? What will happen when Cooley moves on?

Most important: How will they know if they succeed in their mission?

McKnight said success can be measured by “whether or not people have more economic power, more capacity to solve social problems and more political influence. It’s a comparative judgment, and the way you measure it is by the judgment of the people who are there. There isn’t any baseline you can count on.”

Funding agencies require progress on measurable objectives. But Cooley doesn’t speak that language naturally. “They want to know how many ‘units’ I’ve cranked out. They call human beings ‘work force units.’ Can you imagine that?”

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A basic truth--and one that is uncomfortable for many bankers--is that much change is spiritual, Cooley said. Four of the founding members of the team are Quakers who feel deeply about shared leadership. “The miracle comes when people honor your spirit,” she said, her eyes watering with emotion.

On the other hand, some dry-eyed city officials say you can’t pay people just to feel good. Others argue that repairing trust is a two-way street involving government and major institutions as well as neighbors in the community.

Corporate donors who now give to symphonies and art museums, colleges and social service agencies also need to understand that “community” is complex, and they need to work directly with neighborhood residents if they want to help, said Greg Chaille, president of the Oregon Community Foundation, which manages $170 million in diverse funds.

But some contend that no matter how successful grass-roots organizations are, they will always be subject to larger forces beyond the neighborhood--the multinational corporations unconcerned with local investments, the plant closings that take away jobs, the big shifts in the economy and national politics.

Said the housing and community development bureau’s Knox: “Unless we can attract more than our share of decent-paying jobs that do not require extremely high skill levels, people are going to be hurt.” The area is already saturated with small businesses, she said. “I don’t know what percentage of the people we’re trying to help will really be able to find career paths that lead up and out to really decent middle-class type incomes. I know it will be a process and not overnight.”

Still, a few individuals have already seen a big change in their lives. Andrea Cole is a 23-year-old single mother dumped by her boyfriend after they moved from St. Helens to Outer Southeast.

When her welfare ran out after three months under Oregon’s new rules, she found support through the ROSE CDC and the Neighborhood Pride Team to help her open a family day-care center in her rented home. She printed brochures at the skills center. Now she cares for five other children and can afford her food and rent without having to leave her infant son in day care herself.

If she hadn’t landed in Outer Southeast, she said, she’d probably be living in a rundown apartment in downtown Portland with roommates and a job she hated. All things considered, Cole said, “I got lucky.”

* Inside: Hundreds of exciting experiments are underway in the Los Angeles area--and the number is growing one expert says. E4.