Tim Himes: Richmond Coalition Builds Safety Nets

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

- Margaret Mead

Greetings neighbors, from your neighbors in the Richmond District Interfaith - Neighborhood Agency Coalition (RDI-NAC). It's been a while since our last Richmond Review update so I thought I'd share with you all what we've been up to in pursuit of our mission: "People of faith and community service celebrating diversity, promoting justice and healing, and creating connections that serve and empower those most in need in our neighborhoods."

With our assistance, the Richmond Village Harvest has now grown to five district food pantry locations serving hundreds of people, particularly amongst our elderly and immigrant populations. We've also formed the Global Village Project, an inter-organization effort to assess and address inter-racial tensions at George Washington High School.

And, amongst our greatest accomplishments, we've been very successful at fostering increased awareness and collaboration in the district via our networking services, such as our quarterly newsletters and our face-to-face relationship-building and awareness-raising quarterly breakfasts.

These services have brought neighborhood leaders and citizens in often isolated faith organizations and public agencies together to get to know each other and explore opportunities for collaboration. Taken together, our group projects and those that have been fostered amongst our members via our networking services, have added up to a incredible amount of care and resources in and amongst our public agencies and faith organizations being brought to bear on our neighborhood's needs.

Here's where we're headed in the future: The coalition is strengthening its current programs and services, expanding its "membership" in both numbers and diversity, increasing its relationship-building networking services and effectiveness and identifying and addressing new areas of need in our neighborhood.

One new area we've identified during our Fall 2002 survey for coalition attention is strengthening/building neighbor to neighbor interaction. Our membership recognized that, given the growing decrease in the budgets of our service organizations and the growing number of those in need due to our weak economy, it has become especially important in these times for citizens to form the connections they need to take care of each other, particularly the most needy.

In addition, we believe strengthening and building neighbor-to-neighbor interaction will greatly enhance all of our abilities to address the other top concerns identified by our survey for new and/or continuing consideration: racism, ethnocentrism, cross-cultural interaction and education, identifying and helping families in need, hunger and food assistance programs and affordable housing.

At our January breakfast attendees addressed the first stage of our strategy to strengthen and build neighbor-to-neighbor interaction; exploring together our own experiences and wisdom on the subject. Stories were shared about good and bad neighbor interaction, causes of each were discussed, and possible ways to foster the good neighbor interaction were brainstormed.

At our next breakfast, on April 29 at 8:30 a.m. at Congregation Beth Shalom (1301 Clement St.), we will tackle the next stage in our strategy: Identify together what we'll need to start actually enhancing and creating more community connections. All those involved in neighborhood agencies/associations and/or faith organizations are welcome to join us as we pursue together this and other neighborhood improvement projects. The "together" part in all of this has been and remains at the heart of our endeavor(s).

Margaret Mead was right. By working together on issues we've significantly strengthened the connections between us, thereby enabling us to more effectively learn about Richmond District needs and wants and then craft collaborative solutions that bring all of our strengths and resources to bear.

If you're interested in more information about the coalition and the upcoming breakfast, please contact me at 668-5955, ext. 375.

Tim Himes is the RDI-NAC's program director.