Block 4: Grant Money and Elbow Grease

Block 4: “Grant Money and Elbow Grease”

Helicopters whirled over my head and I could hear police sirens blaring in the distance as I hopped out to walk the block. Feels like standard background noise around here. My eldest was raised in Chatham. She knew about helicopters before she did butterflies.

It's September 11, 2024 and I’m taken back to the day. It was my first semester at Wayne State College in Nebraska and now, with the aid of time, that feels like the beginning of something for me. After 9/11, I started a fundraiser on campus to raise money for the victims. I did the same for the Hurricane Katrina Victim Relief Fund. I didn’t know what a nonprofit was back then, I guess I was just doing what I hoped someone would do for me. Now, nearly 25 years later, I'm still out raising money for block clubs and folks like Lisa Davis, Block Club Captain at 1700 East 85th Street.

We start our walk at the corner in front of a beautiful block club sign that my organization designed and installed a few years back. Most block club signs in Chicago say things like “NO Littering,” “NO Loitering,” “NO Looting,” and so about five years ago we started creating signs with a more positive message. Now, we come to the block and talk about the things neighbors are passionate about and then hand-paint a new block club sign based on that conversation. Some folks have gardens on their signs, others have slogans, heritage, meaningful colors. Really anything you can think of. The sign we created for Mrs. Davis has a few hand painted homes and says “Welcome” at the top. Along the bottom it reads, “A proud community of families." Mrs. Davis says the sign is leaning a bit now. Those are marching orders for my team to come get that sign back upright. 

Mrs. Davis says her philosophy on community organizing is to stay connected and see the change. She took the lead on her block by beautifying the four street corners. She started by talking with the home owners of the corner lots and convinced them to let her put a garden on each plot, right before the street and in-between the sidewalks. "We did the corners with gardens and then we got the sign from y’all. Then everyone started looking and getting motivated. That first beautification project gave us momentum, now we’re doing corner gardens on multiple streets.” 1700 East 85th Street Block Club got a $5,000 grant from My Block, My Hood, My City last year to continue their work. “Just takes a little grant money and elbow grease.” 

But it wasn’t all perfect on her block. Chatham has good bones so a house with boarded up windows stands out like a sore thumb and Mrs. Davis identified one in particular as the real problem, “the teenagers live there and they throw a lot of trendy parties. You don’t wanna indict the young people, but we’re struggling.” She says the parties last from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. and most of the block is scared because there’s always drama. Her voice got lower as we walked by, almost to a whisper. The last party had over 100 people. None of the neighbors know what to do.

I told Mrs. Davis I would give some thought on how to best engage with the younger people on her block. There’s definitely some intergenerational communication training that we can talk about, but one of the main things I’ve learned over my years of working with Chicago’s youth is that it's just going to come down to being authentic and consistent. 

In the meantime, Mrs. Davis devotes her energy to making sure the block’s lawns and gardens are being taken care of. I’m sure she doesn’t want me to share this, but she pays for an elderly neighbor’s yard to be mowed twice a month. Mrs. Nesbitt lives at the end of the block and her lawn requires a lot of care. She’s scared of the violence in the area and so she has allowed the weeds to take over her fences. The overgrowth is so high it has literally created a privacy fence that looks like the Wrigley Field walls in mid-August. If you didn’t know better, you might think the house was abandoned. It definitely needs more work than Mrs. Davis can attend to (and it shouldn’t fall on her shoulders alone) but cutting the lawn is a start.

Mrs. Davis is doing a great deed because she truly loves her block and takes pride in knowing it like no one else. She doesn’t even need to look at the homes to know who lives there, she just glances at the front yard and rattles off the owner, “this is Natasha's yard,” and “this one is Darry’s.” Gardening is her passion but the connections she’s made while doing it is her real purpose.