A few nights ago I was hosting karaoke at a VFW post. I always love hosting at social clubs like VFWs because the people are always down-to-earth and welcoming. I was talking to one of the wives of one of the members and she was telling me how she grew up a few houses away from the post and she had lived in the neighborhood her entire life – in fact, she still lives there. She was remembering when she was growing up and when she first got married and had her children how neighbors were, well “neighborly”. People talked to each other and helped each other out and created and maintained a sense of community. She was expressing her sadness that over the past 10 years the neighborhood had lost its feeling of neighborhood because the new people who were moving in would build large fences around their very small lots leaving the neighborhood feeling more like prison than a neighborhood.
I could understand where she was coming from. I grew up in the country in Southern Illinois where everyone knew their neighbors and everyone helped each other. If someone needed help…you just helped them – no questions asked. Now I live in a city myself, and while I’m fortunate to have good neighbors, I do understand that feeling of being alone and like a number. Everyone keeps to themselves too much. My personal opinion is that the societal focus on big corporations and technology has a lot to do with this. Don’t get me wrong. Technology is great and some things we can do so much easier now because big corporations put tons of money into helping to make daily life easier. But all this progress has come at a cost. Everything goes so fast and so many people are so caught up in the “rat race” that we often forget to say hello to the person next door to us or to even remember that we are part of a larger community.
As a grant writer, this concept of neighborhoods, I believe, is quite relevant. As government funding continues to decrease and even private foundations are giving less due to the difficult economy, people on the neighborhood level are going to have to work together to improve their communities if they want to make meaningful change. There are hundreds of amazing projects that have been started by one or two concerned neighborhood residents and have really helped communities, whether it’s starting a community garden, a neighborhood safety watch, a program to visit senior citizens to make sure they are OK, or even social events for residents to get acquainted. I believe the need and opportunity for neighborhood development that starts at the neighborhood level will continue to grow and there will be more opportunities for grant funds to support these kinds of efforts.
One good example of someone who is helping to promote and support projects that were started on the neighborhood level is the National Institute for Civic Enterprise, also known as the NICE Network. This project was started by Debra Berg, after she spent eight years researching going around the country and identifying people who were doing cool things to help their communities. Her quest resulted in a book called “The Power of One”. Learn more about her work at www.nicenetwork.org.
If you have any stories of cool neighborhood development projects started by motivated residents, please feel free to post them here.
