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"Community Building in Logan Square" Assignment Please read the attached article entitled: "Community Building in Logan Square" by Mary O'Connell. For this assignment, you will be writing a critical analysis of the article. Your paper needs to be between 1000 and 1500 words. To organize the assignment, please comment on the following: ________________________________________ Choose three (3) ideas or concepts in the article that the author proposes that you found interesting and/or challenging to your thinking. Introduction: Summarize the three ideas you'll be covering in your paper. Body: Further expand upon each of the 3 ideas listed in your introduction, and answer the following about each idea (one body section each): - Describe why you found the idea or concept interesting or challenging? - How does this idea or concept demonstrate that the community is stronger with the contributions of people with disabilities? Conclusion: In your concluding paragraph, explain how the ideas you've summarized will impact your work as a future Developmental Services Worker. __________________________________ Please complete your assignment using double spacing with a 12pt. font for easier reading. This assignment is worth 10% of your course grade. You will be assessed on the following: Length: 25% of Total Mark Content Quality: 50% of Total Mark Grammar and Spelling: 25% of Total Mark Commumity Building in Logan Square COMMUNITY BUILDING IN LOGAN SQUARE How a community grew stronger with the contributions of people with disabilities by Mary O'Connell © 1990 by the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research (now known as the Institute for Policy Research) September 1990 THIS REPORT WAS PRODUCED BY: The Community Life Project, Project of the Neighborhood Innovations Network Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research Northwestern University 2040 Sheridan Road Evanston, IL 60208 John L. McKnight Principal Investigator Kathy Bartholomew-Lorimer Project Director Rosita De La Rosa Field Researcher Mary O’Connell Research Writer THE COMMUNITY LIFE PROJECT WAS FUNDED BY: The Department of Rehabilitation The Chicago Community Trust Services 222 N. LaSalle Street State of Illinois and Suite 1400 623 E. Adams Chicago, IL 60601 Springfield, IL 62701 (312) 372-3356 (217) 785-0218 1 I. Communities, Big-City Neighborhoods, and the People Who've Been Left Out Most Americans live in big cities, but our myths center around an ideal small-town past: a place where people sipped lemonade together on the front porch, watched out for the neighbors' kids, shared the work of the town and the fruits of their gardens. These images, still powerful despite exploitation in a thousand advertisements for fast-food franchises and tasteless beer, touch a collective vision of community. Garrison Keillor has lovingly (and sharply) drawn the details in his stories of Lake Wobegon, the mythical Minnesota town of his youth. Keillor also draws the contrast with big city life, which he and most of the rest of us have chosen; of his exile from Lake Wobegon, he writes: I haven't lived there for twenty-five years. I've lived in a series of eleven apartments and three houses ... in St. Paul and Minneapolis. Every couple years the urge strikes, to pack the books and unscrew the table legs and haul off to a new site. The mail is forwarded, sometimes from a house several stops back down the line, the front of the envelope covered with addresses, but friends are lost — more all the time, it's sad to think about it. All those long conversations in vanished kitchens when for an evening we achieved a perfect understanding that, no matter what happened, we were true comrades and our affections would endure, and now our friendship is gone to pieces and I can't account for it. Why don't I see you anymore? Did I disappoint you? Did you call me one night to say you were in trouble and hear a tone in my voice that made you say you were just fine? (pp 19-20) Many Americans lament the loss of neighborliness, the disappearance of community that sometimes seems an inevitable consequence of big-city life. For some, the lost community is not a small-town past, but "the old neighborhood," "the way things used to be": before the neighborhood "changed" and friendly faces on the street were replaced by strangers. Other people simply find that sustaining 2 community life is difficult in the face of poverty, violence, drugs, gangs, racial tensions, fear: common problems that plague neighborhoods in every city. Such problems make people hearken back to memories (or myths) of a place where people knew one another, looked out for one another, and shared what they had even if (especially in city slums and ghettoes) there wasn't much to share. In part, this book is about one effort, in one Chicago neighborhood, to try to build a new sense of community.1 It's about shared work and shared pleasure, about intimacy and celebration, about taking time to know one another and look out for one another, about accepting things that cannot be changed. It is a story of small beginnings, but beginnings that carry a hope of regeneration. The book has a second focus as well: it looks at the experience of people who have often, by neglect or by design, been shut out of communities. These are people who are "different" in some very visible ways from most other people: because they don't talk, or they move awkwardly, or act differently, or can't quite handle ordinary tasks the rest of us take for granted. Such people have been labeled in different ways (mentally retarded, developmentally disabled, handicapped). All the labels focus on what is "different" about them, and obscure what about them is "the same" as the rest of us: the same needs for dignity, for pleasure, for friendship, for a sense of the future and a place in the community. The differences and the labels have been a justification for deliberately taking these people out of their communities and placing them instead in social service institutions where people are trained (and paid) to help them. In recent years, people have questioned whether such institutions really help the people they are supposed to serve. And other people have questioned their huge costs. Those questions led to "deinstitutionalization": many people were 1 This report was based on experiences through September 1989. 3 moved out of big institutions and into what were supposed to be "community settings." In Chicago, that meant in practice that people were put in halfway houses and group homes, usually in neighborhoods they had no previous connection with. Some of these people ended up on the streets. Others stayed with family, but often still remained isolated from other social contact. Others found themselves in group homes that were officially located in "the community" but really had no contact with what was going on in the neighborhood all around. People like Pete, for example. Pete, a man in his forties, lived most of his life in a large institution until it was closed down a few years ago. Now he lives in a group home. Physically Pete lives in a neighborhood, but he isn't part of it. He doesn't know his next-door neighbors, and people on the street don't stop to talk to him (even though he is friendly and responsive if you do). If he got sick or died, nobody in the community would even know he was gone. He is as isolated in the "community setting" as he was in the state hospital. This book brings together these two themes: it is about building community, and about finding a place in the community for Pete. It tells the story of a small effort called Community Building, and what happened during its first year and a half in a Chicago neighborhood, Logan Square. 4 II. Getting Acquainted Community Building. The Community Building effort had its origins in a research project at the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The purposes of the work are, first, to examine ways that people around the country have found to bring people with disabilities into the everyday life of communities2 and second, to try to achieve this kind of integration in a Chicago neighborhood. Although the work started in a university, it is not primarily an academic endeavor. And although, in the popular view, people with disabilities should be taken care of by social services, the Community Building effort has remained separate from social service agencies. That's because, in the experience of the people involved in the work, the connection of this kind of work to social services usually means disconnection from typical community life: a person is pulled off a path of a community member and onto a path as a client. The magnitude of this disconnection has been a major finding of the research to date. It was also felt that being a member of a community is different from being a client of an agency or institution.3 Instead, the aim has been to work with a neighborhood organization. Neighborhood organizations are voluntary groups where neighbors come together to work on common problems: getting new stop signs and better police service, stopping the spread of drugs or graffiti, fighting housing deterioration, working to 2 For more information on this, see Gift of Hospitality, by Mary O'Connell, Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston IL, 1988. 3This paper is in no way an argument against formal (paid) support in people's lives. Many people with disabilities need formal support to enhance and make possible a life in community. It is, however, a criticism of services by social service agencies that segregate and group people. Segregation isolates people from community and diminishes personal autonomy, choice, dignity, and access to community. 5 keep local banks, shops, and employers investing in the neighborhood.