Community Walk Meeting

One part of a Community Food Security Assessment is typically a household survey, which often means hitting the streets and going door to door. Lucky for this intern, GHOPE called in backup. Genesis Lutheran Church (which GenesisHOPE is part of) occasionally holds “community walks”, in which members of the congregation knock on the doors of the church’s neighbors to introduce themselves and try to foster a sense of community. What better opportunity can there be to conduct some community-based research?
During Saturday’s (6/22) community walk, walkers conducted brief surveys with residents to gather and record residents’ concerns about food, as well as amarketing survey for the Islandview Farmers’ Market which GenesisHOPE operates. Jeanine had taken care of planning the event well before I began here, but I took the opportunity to attend a prep meeting for the walk this past Tuesday. I had the pleasure of meeting a few of the members of GLC, who gave me a much deeper understanding of the church and its complicated position in this neighborhood.
First of all, few GLC members live in the neighborhood. Many of them did long ago, and kept coming back on Sundays after they moved elsewhere. There is a high turn-over rate in the area, they told me, so any residents who join the church generally don’t stay around for very long. Nobody can blame them, though. The elephant in the room these days is a recent report which named the area around the intersection of Mack Avenue and Helen Street the second most dangerous neighborhood in the country. GLC is on the corner of Mack and East Grand Boulevard, one block to the east. While most of the crime occurs between gangs rather than innocent residents, the psychological impact of such a title could not be ignored.
Thus, the members of Genesis have become outsiders in their old neighborhood, lacking any productive relationship with the people around them who constantly come and go. Without that relationship, efforts to reach out to the community have had trouble gaining traction outside of the church. Community walks serve as an attempt to make their presence known and forge a stronger sense of camaraderie, but in an area this dangerous, earning the trust of your neighbors isn’t so simple. Uniting this neighborhood and promoting community action will undoubtedly prove a challenging, long-term undertaking for the members of Genesis. In terms of community-based research, it complicates how I view my own role. The people I’m researching with are, for the most part, outsiders themselves. As of right now, only one person I work with is actually a member of the community I’m researching. That community, however, the one outside this church, hardly seems to exist, as people seem to move in and out without interacting with each other. The only common factor between neighbors seems to be their geography and their poverty. Whether that’s enough to constitute a community is another question all together.