Section 6. Improving Parks and Other Community Facilities

Example #1: Femke Rosenbaum and Spontaneous Celebrations

Improving community facilities can be a long process.  In order to create a new facility and turn it into a community institution, you may have to wait in line as other facilities are developed, make your way through political and interpersonal thickets, and have enormous persistence.  Femke Rosenbaum, founder of Spontaneous Celebrations Community Arts Center, has been able to negotiate all of the above and more to create a neighborhood center that’s now very much a fixture in her community.

Spontaneous Celebrations is a community arts center in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.  It runs programs for youth and adults, provides space for other arts projects, and puts on community festivals..  It is a community facility owned and run by the community itself, and the diverse board includes teens as well as adults, and people from many backgrounds and cultures.

The center reflects the vision of its Dutch-born founder, Femke Rosenbaum.  When she and her husband, Peter (Slug), moved to Jamaica Plain in the early 1970’s, they were looking not only for a place to live, but for a community they could be part of and could raise the family they planned.  They hoped to work for social change, not through protest and confrontation, but through art and the forging of relationships.  They bought a big Victorian house, made affordable by the then less-than-savory reputation of the neighborhood, and settled in for the long haul.

Before coming to Jamaica Plan, Femke had taught in an alternative elementary school in Philadelphia.  She says, “I was influenced by Deschooling Society [by Ivan Illich] and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I wanted to bring education into the community.” With the hope of connecting schools and community more closely, she started a community art center in her basement.  She hoped to bring together children from many areas of the diverse neighborhood to make art out of recycled materials, and to learn to respect the earth and one another.  Soon the house was filled most afternoons with children making noise and exercising their creativity.  The first seeds of a unique community facility had been sown.

In the decade before the Rosenbaums came, much of the neighborhood had been under threat of being cut in half by the city’s plans to build a portion of a highway through the middle of it.  Hundreds of homes and businesses had already been torn down to make way for the highway, leaving a swath of undeveloped land slicing through the heart of the community.  This wasteland became a magnet for crime, further dividing Jamaica Plain by creating a dangerous barrier between the areas on either side of it.

By 1970, community protest had halted preparations for the highway (it was formally scrapped in 1975), but the devastation of the area – now called the Southwest Corridor – remained.  In 1976, the Southwest Corridor Community Farm formed to develop community gardens on a piece of the wasteland.  The number of gardeners grew quickly, with Femke and Slug prominent among them.  While the community garden flourished, most of the Southwest Corridor was still a garbage-strewn, overgrown moonscape...and more seeds were sown.

Femke, trailed by three small children, still ran art classes in her basement, but had made connections with a number of groups of all sorts, some oriented toward politics, some toward culture, some toward the environment.  One of the groups was led by a woman who taught folklore at a local university, and who was especially interested in festivals and their importance in various societies.  Femke, by now a member of the Jamaica Plain Arts Council, recruited a loosely-organized group to organize a community festival. They worked with the folklorist to define the spring festival traditions of the various groups – Hispanics, Blacks, and working-class Whites of various European backgrounds – in the Jamaica Plain and neighboring Roxbury neighborhoods.  Eventually, the group got a grant to teach traditional dances and other festival activities to kids, who would then perform them at a community spring celebration.

The first Wake Up the Earth Festival, organized by Femke and a few others, took place in May of 1979 on vacant land in the Southwest Corridor next to the community gardens. It was meant to be “a celebration of what can be accomplished when people of all traditions, cultures, ages, and beliefs come together,” to demonstrate and celebrate the use of the wasteland, and to create a community tradition.  Femke, through previous contact with them, was able to convince skeptical Black and Latino organizations in Jamaica Plain and neighboring Roxbury, long accustomed to being used politically, to take part.

Cooperation from the city was not forthcoming. “The morning of the festival, we realized that the lot next to the farm was still covered with garbage, when the city had said they would clean it up.  We swept it all up and put it in Slug’s dump truck, and parked it in back of the greenhouse.  Then when the festival was over, we put it back on the ground – all in a big pile, not scattered.  The city eventually took it away, weeks later.”

Participants paraded through the three neighborhoods representing the different cultures involved and there were spectacular dance performances and food.  A community tradition had indeed been born: May, 2007, marked 29th Wake Up the Earth Festival. The first drew several hundred people, remarkable in itself; festival attendees now regularly number about 10,000 – with no publicity.

Shortly after, partially as a result of the success of Wake Up the Earth, Femke was instrumental in an effort by the Arts Council to acquire the old neighborhood fire station, which was about to be replaced, for a community arts and performance center. Eventually, after much political wrangling, the Firehouse Community Arts Center was born, with Femke a member of the board. That board was split, however, between those who believed in art purely for its own sake, and those who, like Femke, also saw it as a vehicle for social change.

Femke is very clear that she wasn’t particularly interested in political art, but rather in art as a vehicle.  “I was political, but I really wanted to do something positive – that’s what Wake Up the Earth was about.  I saw art as a way to bring people together.”.  She was seen by many as a radical, however, and her relationship with the Firehouse and its director was never comfortable.  But her community-building continued: in 1984, now with four children in tow, she led the first Lantern Festival.  A group of neighborhood residents carried home-made candle lanterns – many constructed in lantern-making workshops at the Firehouse – around 62-acre Jamaica Pond, one of the central features of the neighborhood, on an evening in late October. Another community tradition was born: the Lantern Festival, now more than 20 years old, regularly attracts a procession of about 5,000 stretching over a mile – more than the circumference of the pond – bringing light as the nights grow longer.  A few years later, the midwinter Tropical Festival was initiated as a fundraiser for the Firehouse, and also took on a life of its own.

Femke chafed at the programming restrictions placed on her by her association with the Firehouse. “They wanted me to run a program that was a couple of hours a couple of afternoons a week, just to make stuff for the festivals.  But when the festivals get close, you’re working around the clock, and I wanted to do more than just make costumes or teach stiltwalking. So in 1991, I rented the basement under the name of Spontaneous Celebrations. That was the beginning of Spontaneous – the name on the check in 1991.”

When the Firehouse refused her offer to lease the basement space on a long-term basis, Femke started searching for a building, moving Spontaneous Celebrations into the old German Club a few blocks away in 1995. Since then, the center has become a true community facility. It started with a Festival Arts program for middle school kids, which focused on making costumes and decorations for the festivals, and learning traditional dances, songs, and skills (stiltwalking, for instance).  One group of sixth graders became so enthusiastic that they stayed with the program for three years.  When Spontaneous had no high school program for them to graduate into, they started one themselves – Beantown Society, dedicated to the eradication of teen violence in the still-dangerous neighborhood.

A course in drumming from different traditions has led to the Spontaneous Samba Band, which plays at the Spontaneous festivals, and at other events and locations around the city. La Pinata, a program of the Latin American Family Cultural Network, teaches the traditions of their cultures to Latino children. All in all, Spontaneous Celebrations is a lively place that reflects the faces, cultures, and traditions of all the people in the neighborhood and surrounding areas. It’s a community institution now, synonymous with Jamaica Plain. It serves to introduce children of all cultures to one another and to one another’s art and traditions, to awaken their creativity, and to instill in them the importance of celebrating life.  And now, although Femke has retired from her formal association with it, the project carries on, leading to changed lives and a stronger community.

 

Example #2: The City Project

© Judith Baca

The City Project believes that all people should have access to healthy, livable communities. Their multicultural, Latino-led team works with diverse allies to ensure equal access to (1) healthy green land use through planning by and for the community; (2) climate justice; (3) physical education and schools of hope as centers of their communities; (4) health equity and wellness; and (5) economic vitality for all, including jobs and avoiding displacement as communities become greener and more desirable. The mission of The City Project is to achieve equal justice, democracy, and livability for all.

As the next generation civil rights advocates, they pursue myriad strategies. They are problem solvers who use many of the same strategies that corporate or transactional lawyers use on behalf of their clients: planning, data collection and analysis, media, negotiation, policy advocacy, and coalition building are all part of a comprehensive problem-solving strategy. They join forces with clients, experts, and broader coalitions to seek equity and overcome structural barriers to a more equitable society. Their work can be framed as promoting new partners for smart growth, equitable development, ecosystem services, and compliance with civil rights and environmental justice policies and laws.

Goals

1. Healthy Green Land Use, Equitable Development, and Civic Engagement through Planning by and for the Community

The City Project promotes active living and healthy eating in communities that are park poor, income poor, or of color. They engage, educate, and empower diverse allies to plan, create, and preserve multi-benefit healthy green land use and infrastructure projects for active living, climate justice, and clean air, water, land, and habitat protection. This includes joint use of parks, pools, and schools; complete green streets with transit, biking, walking, and safe routes to school; and new partners for smart growth.

They provide multidisciplinary consulting, research, and analyses to inform healthy, sustainable planning by and for the community for generations to come. Their major publication, which reflects community based participatory research, has been influential in planning reports and studies by the federal government and others: Healthy Parks, Schools and Communities: Mapping Green Access and Equity for Southern California (The City Project Policy Report 2011), available at http://www.mapjustice.org. The National Park Service cites their work in recognizing that there is not enough green space for all, there are disparities in park access and health based on race and ethnicity, and park agencies need to address these concerns.

Healthy green land use projects underway with diverse allies and agencies include:

• Greening the Los Angeles River
• Creating the San Gabriel Mountains National Recreation Area
• Greening the San Gabriel River
• National Parks Service Work Group on Healthy People,
  Healthy Parks Community Engagement Resource Guide
• California State Parks Forward Initiative
• Expanding the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area

They implement lessons learned from their successful projects, which include creating or preserving over 1,000 acres of urban green space in:

• Los Angeles State Historic Park – “a heroic monument” and “a symbol of hope,” according to the L.A. Times
• Rio de Los Angeles State Park, the starting point for greening the L.A. River
• Baldwin Hills Park in the historic heart of Black L.A., the largest urban park designed in the US in over a century
• Ascot Hills Park. Before that park, the largest green space in Northeast L.A. was Evergreen Cemetery, which sent a message to children that if they wanted green space, they had to die first.
• Vista Hermosa Nature Park, an "L.A. park like no other," according to the L.A. Times, and a best practice for joint use of schools, pools, and parks.
• Clean water and park multibenefit projects at North Atwater Park, South L.A. Wetlands Park, and Garvanza Park
• Kellogg Park in Ventura.

The City Project works to ensure everyone has equal access to active living where they live, learn, work, play, and pray. Best practices include:

• Transit to Trails to take inner city children on fun, educational, and healthy trips to mountains, beaches, and rivers
• Ensuring public beach access up and down the coast
• Keeping public trails open including Millard Canyon in the San Gabriels and Canyon Back trail in the Santa Monica Mountains.

They ensure parks reflect the culture, history, and diversity of the community through public monuments and art. Best practices include:

• Restoring and expanding the Great Wall of Los Angeles along the L.A. River
• Saving the sacred Native American site of Panhe and San Onofre State Beach
• Restoring Chicano Park in San Diego
• Commemorating Bruce's Beach, the historic Black resort.

They bring nontraditional partners to the table. They help build diverse support for statewide park and water bond measures, with over $10 billion in state park and water bonds passed over the past decade. Voters of color and low-income voters can make the difference in passing properly framed resource measures, and must receive their fair share of the benefits.

They ensure compliance with clean water and environmental justice laws. Through a $2 billion agreement under the Clean Water Act between grassroots groups, US EPA, and the City of Los Angeles, they are improving the sewer system city wide, eliminating offensive sewer odors that plagued Black people in Los Angeles for decades, and investing in multi-benefit park and water infrastructure projects.

2. Physical Education and Schools of Hope

The City Project works on compliance with physical education and civil rights laws with public officials statewide. Dr. Robert Ross, President of The California Endowment, has called this work "a best practice example for districts across the state to provide a quality education for the children of California." Half the school districts audited by the state in 2005-2009 were not in compliance with physical education requirements.

They are implementing the Institute of Medicine’s recommendations to provide physical education minutes, monitor compliance, alleviate disparities, improve teacher education, make physical education a core subject, and improve physical activity in the whole school environment.

They work to make schools the centers of their communities. LAUSD has raised $27 billion to build and modernize public schools. The City Project’s Robert García served as Chair of the Citizens’ School Bond Oversight Committee from 2000 to 2005, overseeing planning and implementation, and signing ballot measures to raise local, state, and federal funds. The district has built 130 new schools and modernized hundreds more since 1998. Hundreds of acres of land were cleaned up. The future became brighter for generations of students. Joint use of schools, pools, and parks makes optimal use of scarce land and resources.

3. Health Equity and Wellness in All Policies

The City Project works on health equity and wellness in all policies, alleviating health disparities, and addressing the social determinants of health. The Affordable Care Act’s section 1557 guards against health discrimination based on race, color, national origin, limited English proficiency, sex, disability, and age. The Act protects health and life itself through wellness, prevention, physical activity, and healthy land use, as well as health care. They work with academics and diverse allies in the planning process to develop regulations, guidance, and best practices for the US Department of Health and Human Services to implement these principles. Concretely, we are working with USC to improve the wellness element in the forthcoming general plan for the City of Los Angeles. They are working on eliminating Latino disparities in food stamp programs. They build healthy, active communities through healthy green land use, physical education, and other policies above.

4. Job and Wealth Creation

The City Project seeks triple bottom line infrastructure solutions that promote equity, economics, and the environment. The park, water, and school bond measures above provide billions of dollars for jobs and wealth creation. Each $50 million of the $27 billion in school bonds has created 935 annual jobs, $43 million in wages, and $130 million in local business revenue. Park jobs can help get the nation back to work, and build people’s feelings of self-worth. They support a 21st Century Conservation Corps to provide jobs, contracts for small, women, minority, and veteran- owned enterprises, careers, and environmental benefits.

5. Strategic Communications

• President’s Award, American Public Health Association, for helping make human health a social justice imperative
• KCETLink/Union Bank Local Hero Award
• PODER Magazine, Top 100 Green Latino Leaders in the Nation
• Hispanic Business Magazine, 100 Most Influential Latino Leaders, "men and women who are changing the nation"
• City of Los Angeles, L.A. River Award “for extensively publishing research and findings on urban parks and their benefits for the River, receiving national recognition in your efforts to revitalize the River, and for your contribution to the greening of the River.”
• Public Stewardship Award, American Society of Landscape Architects, SoCal chapter
• As reported in the New York Times, “The City Project [is] working to broaden access to parks and open space for inner city children, and . . . to fight childhood obesity by guaranteeing that . . . students get enough physical education.”

Major recent publications include:

• Robert García and Ariel Collins, Celebrate The Civil Rights Revolution: The Struggle Continues Policy Report (The City Project 2014)
• Michael Rodriguez, MD, MPH, et al., Using Civil Rights Tools to Address Health Disparities Policy Report (The City Project 2014)
• Robert García, The George Butler Lecture: Social Justice and Leisure 45(1), Journal of Leisure Research 7-22 (Winter 2013)
• Mariah Lafleur et al., Physical Education and Student Activity: Evaluating Implementation of a New Policy in Los Angeles Public Schools, 45(1) Annals of Behavioral Medicine 122-130 (2013)
• Robert García and Ramya Sivasubramanian, Environmental Justice for All: Struggle in Baldwin Hills and South Central Los Angeles, Clearinghouse Review: Journal of Poverty Law and Policy (Nov/Dec 2012)
• Robert García, Physical Activity as a Civil Rights Issue, in Institute of Medicine, Legal Strategies in Childhood Obesity Prevention (Lynn Parker et al., eds. 2011)

Recent videos are available on their web site.

The City Project publishes the Green Justice Blog at KCET Departures online. KCET is the public television station for Los Angeles.

The values at stake. People are coming together to support healthy, safe parks and green space to support the diverse values at stake. These values include the simple joys of playing in the park and school field; improved physical, psychological, and social health; the full development of the child, including improved academics and positive alternatives to crime; economic vitality and local green jobs; conservation values of climate justice, clean air, water, and land, and habitat protection; cultural, art, and spiritual values; and smart, sustainable communities. Equal justice and democracy underlie these other values.

 

Example #3: Columbia Parc at the Bayou District-New Orleans, LA: Holistic Redevelopment to Bring Lasting Change to a Distressed Neighborhood

Learn how social determinants of health are being addressed to build healthier lives, where mixed income housing, new schools, and a sustaining economic anchor completely transformed a once-struggling neighborhood in post-Katrina New Orleans in this Community Close-Up from the Building Healthy Places Network.

 

Example #4: ‘Active Living Trails’ Give Boost to Public Parks in Northeast Kansas City, KS.

Photo from KU Today: Architecture Professor Nils Gore installs an inspirational sign in KCK's Parkwood Park. Credit: Matt Kleinmann

The Dotte Agency was one of three groups across the nation to receive grants from the new Gehl Institute to try out its cutting-edge tools for measuring activity and value in public space. The agency improved local parks, creating “active living trails” in order to introduce health education, motivation and social connectedness to the community on a modest budget. The project built capacity in the neighborhood and worked to improve the health of the community by improving access to public parks.

 

Example #5: Revitalizing Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston

Located within minutes of downtown Houston, Buffalo Bayou Park is a 160-acre, 2.3-mile long public space that has been subjected to years of neglect. Surrounded on both sides by high-use thoroughfares, the park was also difficult for nearby neighborhoods to access. In 2010, the Buffalo Bayou Partnership (BBP) received a $30 million grant from the Kinder Foundation, which served as a fundraising catalyst for the park’s revitalization. In 2012, under the leadership of the BBP Board and President Anne Olson, collaborative partners including the City of Houston, the Harris County Flood Control District (HCFCD), and a variety of non-profit organizations, design firms, and community groups began reconstruction of the park. Read more. 

 

Example #6: Unity Park - Richmond, California

Groundwork USA, a national network of community-based organizations that enhances the built environment of underserved communities, mobilized local neighborhoods to design and construct an accessible green space for the public. Transforming an underutilized corridor into Unity Park, residents acknowledge that the collaborative infrastructure enabled greater degree of civic engagement, increased bonding, social capital and reduced isolation and loneliness. Read more.

 

Example #7: Defining and Unpacking the Social Determinants of Health and Health Equity–A Culture of Health Webinar

The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) held the first webinar in its Culture of Health Webinar Series on November 29, 2018. The National Academies report Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity identified nine social determinants of health and how these determinants impact our health and the health of our communities. They mention engaging youth to create a skate park and other community resources. The report also defines health equity as the state in which everyone has the opportunity to attain full health potential and no one is disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or any other socially defined circumstance. Read more.

 

Example #8: Changing the Landscape: People, Parks, and Power

In Changing the Landscape: People, Parks, and Power, Prevention Institute and Alessandro Rigolon of the University of Utah propose an approach to addressing park and green space inequities that prioritizes building power among people closest to the problem so that they can drive policy and systems change solutions. The paper includes lessons learned from other public health movements that can benefit the park equity movement as well as examples of promising green space equity policies. It was funded with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Read more.

 

Example #9: Jersey Creek Park Trail in Kansas City

Broderick Crawford, the executive director of the NBC (New Bethel Church) Community Development Corp., sees possibilities in deterioration. He envisions children biking to the playground, perhaps to play pickup basketball, and families who can enjoy the outdoors in safety.

The NBC Community Development Corp. is one part of a multifaceted coalition that includes Healthy Communities Wyandotte, Community Health Council of Wyandotte County, FreeWheels for Kids, UG Parks and Recreation, the University of Kansas School of Architecture, the Latino Health for All Coalition and other organizations that are working to improve the health of Wyandotte Countians. Read more.

 

Example #10: People, Parks, and Power: A National Initiative for Green Space, Health Equity, and Racial Justice

People, Parks, and Power (P3) is the first national funding initiative in the U.S. to support power building by community-based organizations to reverse deep seated park and green space inequities in Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities across the country. P3 is a joint effort of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, led and managed by Prevention Institute. P3 will advance park and green space equity through a national grantmaking program, peer-to-peer learning community, research, network building, and strategic communications. Read more.