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Friday, Apr. 24, 2009

Community leaders aim to begin revitalization

Macon Mayor Robert Reichert called together more than 100 community leaders, pastors and residents Thursday and prodded them to organize small groups and begin revitalizing their neighborhoods block by block.

Reichert’s idea is for residents to determine their neighborhoods’ needs — social, economic or housing related — and develop a plan to address them. That plan can then be presented to the city, which can concentrate a variety of resources on assisting residents’ efforts clean up a specific area. Residents may ask for beefed up police patrols, better street lighting, additional parks and recreation programs or for blighted housing to be demolished, Reichert said.

The mayor’s approach has been several months in the making, as his office has sought long-term solutions to violent crime and other problems that threaten to drag down the quality of life in Macon.

“I’m hoping to inspire groups of people to come together and organize in their neighborhood, to lay claim to a defined area within their neighborhood and through partnering with the city to bring resources into the area,” Reichert said.

As a potential model, the mayor presented Communities of Shalom, a national outreach program affiliated with the United Methodist Church and based out of Drew University in New Jersey.

The organization helps residents establish “shalom zones,” faith-based empowerment zones of about four square blocks.

Within these areas, Communities of Shalom trains groups of eight to 24 neighbors to work together to bring systemic change, economic prosperity, healing, health and sustainability to their streets. There are 92 such zones in the United States, said Michael J. Christensen, the organization’s national director.

They combat extreme poverty in Appalachia, work to reduce the high murder rate in Baltimore, provide legal services for illegal immigrants in Dallas, Texas, and build affordable housing in Richmond, Va., among other things. Christensen said typically a Methodist church initiates new shalom zones in their community. Macon is unique, he said, in that the city itself is trying to promote the idea.

“It’s the first time that a city took the initiative,” he said.

Christensen was meeting with groups of residents Thursday afternoon to further discuss the nuts and bolts of the program.

Reichert and Christensen’s presentations came at a daylong conference. The interim director of Macon’s Economic and Community Development Department and an attorney in Reichert’s former law firm also discussed opportunities for residents to form nonprofit organizations that can receive federal funding to support their housing and development work.

Norm Brown, who lives in Lake Wildwood and helps to organize political participation there, said he liked the ideas he heard. Something needs to be done to address the needs of young people, he said, and he was interested to find out what other people are doing in the community. At the same time, he said, he’s waiting to see if the effort will move beyond words into action.

“I’m kind of a ‘show me’ kind of person,” he said.

Curtis West, a pastor at Bethel CME Church on Pio Nono Avenue, said it will take time and energy to adequately address the problems that need to be solved. It will be particularly challenging for churches to pull together, he and others said, given a natural proclivity for turf protection.

But from Thursday’s conference, participants should be able to go back to their individual communities and take what they learned to begin identifying and addressing problems, the pastor said.

“Hopefully we’ll see some results,” he said.

To contact writer Matt Barnwell, call 744-4251.