In 1992, Belltown P-Patch was just
a hope and a sign (top). Today the
P-Patch is the site of public art,
renovated cottages, bountiful gardens and a vibrant community
(above; photo by Jim Diers).
February 2005
Neighbor Intensive
by Jim Diers
P-Patches. The Fremont Troll. The Madrona Woods Waterfall. School kids selling their plants at the Columbia City Farmers Market. Jim Diers, the first director of the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, had a hand in all—and much more. He reflects on community building in this excerpt from his new book, “Neighbor Power” (University of Washington Press, $18.95):
The map hadn’t prepared my wife, Sarah Driggs, and me for the fact that Seattle is built on seven hills. We needed a home, and found ourselves looking for an apartment on the steep slopes of Queen Anne and Capitol Hill.
We needed money, and our job hunt took us through the heavy traffic of downtown, where we struggled to parallel park on equally steep slopes. Feeling hassled, lost, and anonymous in this city of half a million, we almost decided to keep moving—to a smaller town.
Then we found an apartment in Wallingford, a neighborhood near the center of the city, just north of Lake Union. Our neighbors greeted us and made us feel at home. We soon became acquainted with the merchants in Wallingford’s business district. We attended meetings of the Wallingford Community Council and discovered that we weren’t so powerless after all. Wallingford, with a population of about 6,000, had a scale and feel not unlike back home for us, Grinnell, Iowa.
It was in Wallingford that I discovered what it is that makes Seattle such a great place to live. Outsiders know Seattle for the Space Needle, Pike Place Market and Safeco Field; for Mount Rainier and Puget Sound; for Boeing, Microsoft and REI; for the General Strike of 1919 and the anti-WTO demonstrations of 1999; for Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain; for salmon and coffee; and for the incessant rain. But it’s certainly not the rain that keeps most people in Seattle.
I came to see that Seattle’s greatest asset is the strong sense of community that comes from our vibrant neighborhoods. When you ask Seattleites where they live, they frequently answer with the name of their neighborhood: Alki, Ballard, Capitol Hill, Delridge, Eastlake, Fremont, Greenwood, Haller Lake, the International District.
Seattle has about a hundred neighborhoods. They are typically defined by the city’s topography of hills, valleys and bodies of water.
Each neighborhood usually has a business district and a public elementary school. The average neighborhood—although there is really no such thing as an average neighborhood in Seattle—has about 5,000 residents.
The Grass Roots Factor
Virtually every neighborhood is represented by some form of a community council and often has a business association as well. These grassroots organizations, which advocate on issues, organize events and sponsor projects, are independent of city government and independent of one another.
When Sarah and I moved to Seattle in 1976, though, there were still some neighborhoods that lacked community councils. The neighborhoods with the greatest needs seemed to be the least organized to effect change. Given my longstanding interest in working for social justice and my newfound appreciation for community, I decided that my first job (aside from cleaning the Kingdome’s restrooms on its opening day) would be as a community organizer.
I went to work for a Saul Alinsky-style organizing project started by two Jesuit priests in the low-income, racially diverse neighborhoods of Rainier Valley, Beacon Hill, and Georgetown. My fellow organizers and I canvassed door to door, looking for potential issues and leaders that could serve as the basis for creating local neighborhood organizations.
Typically, I would introduce myself and ask if there were any problems in the neighborhood. All too often the response would be, “You can’t fight city hall” or “Why, are you a lawyer?” In other words, politicians and lawyers were the only ones with power. We tried to give people a sense that they could create their own power by banding together around a common cause. It was a difficult job because people felt isolated and powerless.
One of our first organizing efforts was in the Empire-Kenyon Apartments. In our canvassing, we heard complaints about rent and utility rate increases, substandard housing conditions, rats, the lack of play equipment and the need for a crosswalk signal on the adjacent street, a busy thoroughfare. The tenants felt so overwhelmed by all of these problems that it was difficult to bring them together around any one issue.
A Rallying Point
Then one day a child was killed while using the striped crosswalk on the busy street. We organized a community meeting and invited the Engineering Department.
“What will it take before we can get a signal installed?” the community leader demanded of the city representative. “Another death?”
“No, two deaths” was the response. “We have standards.”
The community was so incensed that, the next day, people formed a steady stream of pedestrians, walking back and forth in the crosswalk, backing up traffic for blocks. The fliers they handed to the waiting motorists read: “Sorry for the inconvenience. We need a light to get traffic moving again.”
The flier asked people to call the head of the Engineering Department—and gave his home phone number—to request a light.
Shortly thereafter a traffic light was installed.
Similar tactics were employed in other neighborhoods. When Dunlap neighbors couldn’t get the Building Department to inspect an illegal dump being created by a contractor, they removed a gigantic boulder from the accumulating pile and hauled it to city hall, where they dumped it in the director’s office.
When elderly and disabled tenants from Holly Park couldn’t get Metro Transit to build a shelter at their bus stop, they invited newspaper and television reporters to come watch them build one for themselves. A Seattle School Board meeting was interrupted by Chinese American students from Cleveland High School performing what they feared would be their last lion dance, because students of color were being bused to other schools. On another occasion, when the mayor, under pressure from the federal department of Housing and Urban Development, backed down on a campaign commitment, a community delegation released a chicken in his office.
My experience with SESCO taught me three valuable lessons about organizing that have guided my work ever since. The first is to start where people are. Most important, this means organizing people around what interests them rather than around what you think they should be interested in.
The second lesson is to organize people around issues that are immediate, concrete and achievable. It’s difficult to bring together community people to do long-range planning, to address a vague problem like “public safety,” or to take on a huge issue like nuclear disarmament. But it is relatively easy to bring together people for a specific, achievable task to address an immediate issue. An example is to plan a course of action to remove violent video games from a local arcade following a neighborhood shooting. Once people have a sense of power because they have succeeded with small issues, they are readier to tackle issues that are larger and take longer.
The third lesson is one that my mentor, Tom Gaudette, drilled into me: “Organizers organize organizations.” The organizer’s role is to build an organization, not to be the leader in winning an issue. Issues are tools the organizer can use to develop leadership and help build the organization so that it is broad-based and self-sufficient. The best organizers don’t foster dependency; they work their way out of their jobs.
In 1988, I got the opportunity to develop a similar model for the City of Seattle. Mayor Charles Royer appointed me the first director of the new Office of Neighborhoods. This was the same mayor whose house I had picketed and whose office we had be-fowled during my time at South End Seattle Community Organization (SESCO). I never did figure out why he hired me, but clearly, he was no chicken after all.
Our Underground Link to Havana
by Jim Diers
When Seattle observed the 25th anniversary of its P-Patch Program in 1998, we invited Eugenio Fuster Chepe to help us celebrate. Chepe is director of Havana’s Department of Urban Agriculture.
I couldn’t wait to brag about Seattle’s fifty community gardens. Fortunately, before I had a chance to embarrass myself, Chepe was talking about the 1,700 community gardens he manages in Havana. He also told me about the million trees his department had helped people in Havana to plant.
All of that had been accomplished since 1992, when Havana faced severe food shortages due to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the ongoing U.S. embargo. A lack of refrigerated trucks meant that fresh produce could not be shipped from the countryside without much of it spoiling in transit.
The solution was to convert Havana’s vacant lots into hundreds of community gardens. All of Havana’s community gardens are organic because of both a strong environmental ethic and a lack of commercial fertilizers and pesticides. Similarly, trees were planted both to help clean the air and to provide fruit and nuts for eating and organic matter for composting.
With our shared interests in organic gardening, urban reforestation, and community building, Seattle and Havana officials realized that we had much to learn from one another. We agreed to enter into a sister-department relationship.
Chepe invited me to come to Havana to see his programs firsthand and to discuss ways in which our departments could work together. As I drove into Havana from the airport in March 1999, I was struck by the great number of community gardens that lined the road, most accompanied by produce stands.
I was especially impressed with the way in which gardens were integrated with schools. A large garden I visited was surrounded by an elementary school, a middle school, a school for the deaf and a school for swimmers. The students work in the garden for two hours each day to fulfill their community-service requirement. Culinary arts classes teach students how to prepare meals from the fresh produce that are then served in the school cafeterias. I may never have eaten better-tasting tomatoes, certainly not in my school cafeteria.
Chepe’s department has developed sophisticated biological controls for pests and disease, and they are for sale at municipally owned garden stores. Seeds and tools can be purchased as well. Advice on growing and composting is dispensed for free by the extension agents. The store I visited was actively promoting the use of worm bins, a technology that Chepe had brought back with him from Seattle. A poster hanging over the bins showed worms with revolutionary caps crawling through the soil, with the caption “The revolution is underground.”
All excerpts reprinted from “Neighbor Power: Building Community the Seattle Way” by Jim Diers, published by University of Washington Press. Copyright 2004 by Jim Diers and the University of Washington Press. All rights reserved.
![[Send]](http://seattle.consciouschoice.com/sendlink/send.gif){kind=small}
Recommend this page to a friend
Top Ten pages recommended to friends:
