Community Voices Podcast: Kevin Ewing

JR- Hello and welcome to another community voices podcast.

(Music)

JR- Would you like to introduce yourself?

Kevin Ewing- My name is Kevin Ewing, I'm a community organizer in new haven, the organizer for a project called our initiative of the community foundation for greater new haven called the neighborhoods of choice initiative and I'm also president of the president of the West River Neighborhood Services Corporation

JR- Can you tell me about what those organizations do or what an average person would need to know about it?

Kevin Ewing- West River Neighborhood Services Corporation is an experiment in neighborhood management and it’s really getting away from the model of the management teams that were set up by the city years ago where a group of community members come together and generally they react to things that happen in their community. The model we’re using is more of a collaborative model where our agenda is set by the members of the community. For example when we have our neighborhood meetings we don’t have agencies coming in to tell us about their programs and get us to sign off on some letter to get them funding, we figure out what we want to do and then invite agencies in that can help us do it. So instead of an agency coming in telling us this is what we are going to do for your community, we decide what we need for our community, what our aspirations are in our community and then we go find agencies that can help us with that. So frequently we get asked, we’d like to come talk to you about our program. Well, no. if you want to come hear what we’re doing that’s fine and maybe next month you can come back and tell us what you're doing and how it relates to what we’re doing. But if it doesn’t relate we will tell you and we will ask you to come back again when we figure out how it relates with our issues. The neighborhood of choice model is actually what led us to this wider model. West River had been organized itself around resident leadership for a number of years and we refined it and grew it with the neighborhood of choice model which is basically a place based model of organizing. So you identify a geographic region based on how the residents defined it. So in Chatham square in fair haven we sat down and looked at the map and looked at how people interacted with the neighborhood and they saw how there are natural boundaries. The river, Grand Avenue, Middletown Avenue, Ferry Street and most people live most of their lives within that boundary, other than work and some other things and so how can we come together and around this place and make this place into something that is vibrant and sustainable and we do that by identifying and agitating into action into local leaders. Getting them to work together, collaborating so we are following a particular model or framework called the healthy neighborhood framework. Put together by fellow creek consultants of Minnesota and we are applying that framework with a methodology called building relational culture, and relational culture is getting people to talk to each other and getting to know each other’s stories and we believe by doing that it expands your power base. Some say there are two roads to power, organized people and organized money; this is the organizing of people. Getting people to know each other recognize, find, and discover what’s in their mutual self interest and then working toward goals that they set. A clear point in mutual self interest is place so if we do issue organizing you may agree on immigration or we may disagree on how to handle immigration. So you will have one point and I will have another point, when our goal is to make this place and that’s we all work, we all play, we all live then that’s a mutual interest. Now how we get to having that place look better, be better may differ but we still have that goal of making the place nicer. The other thing we do is an appreciative inquiry model or an asset based model we don’t necessarily focus on what’s wrong. We figure out how to enhance what’s right. So we evaluate our community. The other thing is the definition of community. We look at community as not just being the residents if we are doing a place based model then everything in there is the community. So in the Yale neighborhood it’s not Yale New Haven Hospital versus the community. Yale new haven hospital is a part of the community. Now how do we get them to see that and how do we get all of us to start working together around this place and making it into something nice?