LEADERSHIP AND STRATEGY IN COMMUNITY THE DEVELOPMENT OF LOCAL INITIATIVE Robbins Gilman, Head Resident, Northeast Neighborhood The distinction between a neighborhood and the community is largely one of individual interpretation. For the purpose of this paper the two terms will be treated as interchangeable, but because the speaker is a settlement worker, the term "neighborhood" will be used instead of community, for to him the former suggests a more easily comprehendable social unit than the latter. Empirical deduction from a settlement window points almost wholly to the conclusion that the size of the political or social unit has in it the germ of its understandableness by those who compose it. A neighborhood, in the sense that I use the term, is generally of that size which allows a certain amount of gossip, and gossip is the fountainhead of that type of analysis which permits people to know of their mutual affairs. The more knowledge of their affairs, the wiser their concerted acts in solving them. Enough, then, for the terminology. We recongize many types and kinds of neighborhoods, and possibly a word or two on types and kinds will set us farther on our way. The neighborhood that has in it all the elements of leadership, and these elements functioning in and for the neighborhood, is probably the ideal. Such a neighborhood has, in all probability, natural boundaries or easily set bounds. The city beautiful is no doubt that city which is composed of the largest number of such neighborhoods. But unfortunately we are not dealing with that type, for it is rare, and our concern is rather elsewhere. There is the neighborhood which is congested-one that has no easily set boundaries. A neighborhood which, because of the number of persons living in it, is suffering from a social and civic inertia born of its size, or dead weight. The University Settlement in New York is situated in such a neighborhood. It is necessary arbitrarily to set the bounds of the intensive area of operations of the University Settlement-seven blocks one way, and five blocks another; these 35 square blocks are designated as the neighborhood. The mass of the population is so dense that general social intercourse is almost impossible. There is the neglected neighborhood which, because of its pocket-like situation, is nobody's concern-not even the real estate operator's-to say nothing of the public service corporation's, or even the municipality's. There is the neighborhood which is neither congested nor neglected, but which lacks what we may call a neighborhood patriotism. This may be due to the type of people of which it is composed, or to the fact that it is a sort of suburb, in the sense that the people who reside in it for the most part only sleep in it. It is easily accessible to a larger center where shops exist and entertainment may be had, and there seems a desire to get out of it as soon as possible after meals, and hence it makes no civic appeal. There are many more types which later discussion may bring out, but for the present purpose it suffices to mention the few just enumerated. If in this hastily prepared paper an apparently undue emphasis is placed on one type of neighborhood more than another, in discussing the development of local initiative, an excuse is easily at hand. In some neighborhoods we find self-appointed leaders who, through an already developed sense of civic responsibility, keep the public conscience aroused. Such a neighborhood forms its own taxpayers' association or improvement league and functions of its own momentum for its best interests, be they civic, commercial, industrial, or even social. We generally find the parent-teacher associations and similar organizations in such a neighborhood decidedly alive, and if there be no clubhouse or community center, the schoolhouses are used à la Perry. The ordinary settlement house neighborhood presents sometimes congestion, sometimes neglect without congestion, and oftentimes both. If such a neighborhood does not possess active leaders, the creation of leadership to produce the leaders is clearly indicated. It may easily be that such leaders are there, but dormant. To discover latent leadership is, therefore, the job. The settlement worker or community leader must set his mind and energies to that important undertaking. This leadership may be found in a man or a woman or a moribund organization, or it may be necessary to create an organization to assume the leadership. In this creative process there must always be an objective. The objective must be either very evident at the start or completely sold to at least the prospective leader before the start. A few examples of objectives will make the point more clear. Take a neighborhood in which the interest in public, that is, purely local, affairs is, to say the least, desultory. A proposition is being considered by the park department to sell a playground because it is claimed that it is not ideally located or used as extensively as it might be. Still, it is better than no playground at all, and if it were sold no other tract would be purchased, so the district would find itself minus a playground. An opportunity is immediately offered to arouse a local interest to prevent this playground from being sold. A local merchant is appealed to, to call together a few neighbors to discuss what may be done about the matter. A list of five persons is suggested, and the merchant induced to call them to his house. The result is that it is decided to hold a mass meeting at the public school near the park to protest against the proposed sale. The park board is told of the meeting and requested to be represented, also the priest of the nearby parish, the children of which should, if they do not, use the playground. The result is a fairly well attended mass meeting at which a few persons speak and a large group of boys and young men are present, the boys and young men representing not only the basketball, football, and hockey teams of the neighborhood, but the coming generation of voters, who are very unconsciously receiving their first lesson in practical civics. This mass meeting develops leaders and local initiative. Another type of objective around which to develop local initiative: After a few persons have been discovered in the neighborhood who can be depended on to assume a certain amount of leadership, a further step can be taken in arousing public opinion, possibly on a little higher plane say the aesthetic level. A proposition to beautify your homes can be suggested, and one of the discovered leaders chosen to sponsor a movement to make local improvements without increasing taxes-by the simple device of removing ugly fences, planting flowers, shrubs, and vines, and sowing and watering the grass. Such a movement presents many interesting educational phases, in addition to developing leaders and arousing the community, such as enlisting the children of the seventh and eighth grades in the neighborhood schools to write letters to their parents urging them to join the beautify-your-home campaign, and awarding to the children of each school prizes for the best letters. The judges might be selected by the principals from the men and women of the neighborhood. The educational value to the children of such a letter-writing contest is a by-product of the campaign which is easily recognized. Judges of the beautify-your-home campaign will award suitable recognition to the home which shows the greatest improvement, say between April 1 and September 30. This offers another by-product by giving to the judges, a group of men and women from outside of the neighborhood, an opportunity to learn the neighborhood and its people. A settlement, according to Felix Adler, is the "House of the Interpreter." Another type of objective: Given a neighborhood composed of different nationalities some neighborhoods have a score given such a neighborhood, given a tendency, as is almost inevitable under such conditions, to divide up into ethnic groups, to remain clanish, which in some respects is unsocial, especially if it gets to the point where a degree of intolerance of the respective groups is apt to spring up, or maybe, which is probably worse, to smolder. The picture is poorly drawn, but possibly you can discern the outline. What can be done to break down the barriers dividing the Polish residents from the Russian, and the Irish from the German, and Czecho-Slovakian from Ukrainian, and so on, down through the twenty different groups? The barriers set up not only divide these groups one from the other, but they retard the civic progress of the whole neighborhood. Some rallying-point must be devised around which they will all gather. There is one such rallying-point, and only one, as far as I know, in the name of which you can make an effective, a certainly effective, appeal in such a situation, and that is their American patriotism. They will not refuse; they cannot (although the note of compulsion is entirely absent); they cannot refuse to join together in celebration of a national patriotic holiday. You may find that the main national holidays-July 4, May 30, February 12 and 22, are each celebrated already by certain of your groups in their own way. Maybe also Columbus Day. It is therefore necessary to select a comparatively unused holiday, and Flag Day-June 14-is an eminently fitting and appropriate one. With Flag Day as the rallying-point, the appeal to head up a neighborhood celebration to commemorate the birth of the nation's emblem can hardly be made in vain to a group of neighborhood leaders. One man acts as general chairman of the celebration; another as chairman of a parade of the children from the public, parochial, and private schools; another to secure the consent of the city superintendent of schools for the children to take part in such a parade; another to obtain from the park board a permit to use the largest neighborhood park; another to get the policemen's or firemen's band for the parade or a concert; another to sell refreshments; another to ask the merchants to close shop at half-past two that afternoon; another to arrange athletic contests for young and old; another to procure a leading citizen to make a patriotic address, and still another to arrange for a dance to give the young people entertainment, under the strict supervision of a committee of mothers and fathers. Such a celebration not only brings together the different nationalities, but develops local leadership, arouses a neighborhood patriotism, and brings about, if even for one day only, a complete forgetting of racial differences. Let me give another type of objective in appealing for leadership. Suppose in a given neighborhood there has been a long-standing nuisance against which the unrebellious residents have taken but a supine attitude of live and let live. Suppose you know this nuisance to be the cause of continuous resentment, the kind that sometimes results in a violent eruption. There is a real need of taking steps to do away with it. Take, as an example of such a nuisance, the retention of a freight assembling yard by a railroad company, in a neighborhood that has grown up around the yard which, when it was first installed years ago, might have been well out in the country. The railroad has maintained the yard with no evil intent; no one has ever objected, and it has never entered the heads of the management to change it. Suppose the noise, dirt, and inconvenience of stalled trains on grade crossings was becoming greater and greater with the increase of population of your neighborhood. You go to one of your selected neighborhood leaders and say, "Mr. Camp, don't you think the Improvement Association could do something to get rid of this switching out here all day and night? People can't sleep-children especially-and the soot and smoke from the switch engines makes the work of the women just twice as hard. A wash hung out on the line is almost black in an hour." Mr. Camp says, "Why, tell the truth, I never gave the matter much thought. It's been that way for forty years to my knowledge, and I never thought there'd be much chance to change it." You suggest that you never can tell what you can do till you try, and finally he says, "Why yes, I'd just as leave bring it up at our next meetingguess I better get Dick interested beforehand, because I want some support in case I bring it up." So you have started Mr. Camp. At the next meeting he proposes, under the head of new business, that the Chair appoint a committee I to see what can be done to abolish this forty-year-old nuisance, and from the way he describes it, every member at the meeting would think he had sat up nights worrying about this crying shame. A committee is appointed; a protest is drawn up to the city council; the local alderman, just about to seek re-election, is enlisted in seeing that after it is read it be referred to the appropriate committee, and thereupon commences a tussle between railroad attorneys and a selected group of outraged neighborhood leaders destined to do more toward developing local initiative, no matter whether they win or lose, than anyone has done in forty years. This is an instance of using a local organization to head up a battle royal for the neighborhood which will form the topic of neighborhood gossip for years to come, and from which most events in the future will be dated. Allow me to cite a final type of objective in developing leadership. In order to deepen the interest of your neighborhood in the affairs of its schools, for the double purpose of bringing your leaders closer to the schools and of arousing a type of leadership which you feel your neighborhood needs, you suggest the holding of a debate, say between three schools. Experience has taught you that jealousies of an unwholesome kind are engendered by giving awards to schools as winners. The defeated are generally disgruntled, and the after-effect is oftentimes very injurious. The debate you have in mind is primarily for two purposes: to give you a chance to develop some new leaders-in this case they will be the judges that are selected to decide the debate and to deepen the interest of the neighborhood in the schools. School principals have to be called on and their interest and cooperation secured. This is an important by-product. A simple device of doing away with awarding a decision to one school is to have each of the three schools select a negative and an affirmative speaker, selected on the tryout method of holding debates in each school on the question. When each school has selected its best negative and affirmative debaters, they join the two teams, composed in that case of three debaters each, each school being represented on each team, and therefore whichever team wins, that team represents each of three schools. The enthusiasm engendered in your neighborhood and the deepened interest in your schools, beside the developing of local leaders in the form of judges of debates-all of this has its wholesome effect on your neighborhood life. Some other rallying-points around which the development of local initiative may well be centered may be mentioned but not discussed: The opening or closing of a street; the erection of an industry which, like a pickle factory, would cause a bad odor, or a piston-ring factory which emits a metal dust; the selection of a site for a schoolhouse; the location of a high school or junior high school; extension of a car line or better car service; improvement in a street's lighting; the ousting of forms of entertainment injurious to the morals of children; the proposed location of a garbage reduction plant; and many others that those in this audience will easily call to mind. This process of developing local initiative has in it, as is very evident, some |