During this, our 50th anniversary year, we’ll be sharing 50 reasons to celebrate Center for Neighborhoods — one reason each week. The posts will come from different stakeholders in the organization, representing our past, present, and future.
This week’s post is written by Dr. Mellone F. Long, CFN Executive Director
I left off last week with this quote from Arthur Mehrhoff’s book entitled Community Design:
“I discovered that community design is not really about fashioning more handsome buildings, interesting views, or attractive landscapes. Community design is ultimately about empowering the citizens of local communities to shape their own preferred futures by acquiring and applying information and knowledge about their communities in a far more systematic, thoughtful, and democratic manner than current practice.”
I think this quote encapsulates the evolution of Center for Neighborhoods from a Community Design Center doing mainly architecture to a center doing mostly empowerment of our neighbors.
This empowerment comes in many forms. The general form we use is working with our neighbors through authentic engagement. This is the challenge we love. We go out and meet our neighbors where they are. There are so many programs that happen out in the neighborhoods: PAINT, Better Block, Neighborhood Planning and our grassroots engagement.
I can’t wait until the Covid risk decreases more, so we can do our favorite things at our normal pace. We will be out in the community providing opportunities to have more art and structural improvements. To explain more clearly, CFN does not provide anything but the space for our neighbors to communicate their ideas, and then the accessibility to make those ideas a reality.
Black History Month is the time to remember our past and think about empowering our communities into the future — and that is what CFN works to do through our programs in our history of 50 years and into our future.