It seems that nearly every adult who grew up in an urban neighborhood, no matter how poor or depressed, recalls some version of the story.
Veronica Calhoun, who spent much of her youth in the Burnside neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side and has raised five children there, tells it this way: “When I was little, if somebody on the block saw me getting in trouble, they said, `I’m going to tell your mother.’ We called them `nosy old bats.’ But you know what? I’m so thankful for those nosy old bats because if they weren’t watching over me, something could have happened to me.”
That basic neighborliness that nurtured and protected children has been complicated by a harsher reality in the last part of this century in urban America: drugs on the street and metal detectors in schools, neighbors who are strangers, and a chilling escalation of child murders, 63 last year in the Chicago area and 61 so far in 1994.
All this has occurred even in the face of an unprecedented onslaught of government social programs to improve conditions in poor neighborhoods. Despite this-and perhaps even in part because of it, some urban experts argue-the condition of children has deteriorated.
Many more live in peril and in poverty amid a seemingly intractable maelstrom of ills.
At least that is the painfully gloomy image that prevails in the minds of most Americans.
It has prompted millions, white and black, to leave inner-city neighborhoods. And it has caused a number of urban analysts essentially to write off the most depressed neighborhoods.
But that is not the only way to view the situation.
A radically different perspective on poor, urban neighborhoods is emerging that, while acknowledging past failures, holds out promise for change.
In simplest form, it rejects the notion that troubled communities are merely a collection of problems that must be solved by outsiders. Instead, such neighborhoods should be recognized as places with untapped assets and individual talents.
Viewed this way, elderly people who have raised children of their own, for example, would orchestrate child-care programs for teenage mothers. Unemployed men who know the ways of the street might organize patrols to protect children on their way home from school.
This approach calls for drastically reshaping the government programs of the past 30 years so that residents see themselves as the driving force for change-not as victims no longer able to affect or improve their lives.
To do otherwise not only stifles long-term gains for a community, it actually hurts its chances, argues John L. McKnight, a Northwestern University urban researcher and a leading proponent of this alternative strategy. McKnight’s tenure in the urban trenches began in the 1950s as a community organizer in racially diverse neighborhoods in the tradition of Saul Alinsky.
The building blocks for this sort of urban regeneration are obvious though seldom acknowledged: committed residents, involved community associations and responsible families, both traditional and non-traditional.
Is it wishful thinking?
Not if you consider the stories of the thousands of people in Chicago who are thriving even in dangerous and impoverished neighborhoods. They offer critical lessons in the essential community relationships and collective action that give people the tools and the will to beat the odds.
These are the tales often lost or ignored amid the spectacular failures and frustrating chronicles of children’s deaths. They are endeavors usually fueled by some combination of religious faith and ethnic and neighborhood pride.
Building upon them will still require outside funds, specialized services and formidable initiative. But the payoffs will be greater, as McKnight has written, “if the local community is itself fully mobilized and invested.”
With the best of intentions, Great Society-style programs have overlooked these good examples, choosing instead to focus attention on the deficiencies and failures of poor communities.
A giant public bureaucracy has been erected to highlight these problems and stamp them out with professionals and experts from the outside who view residents more as recipients than friends. Residents, in turn, often look at social professionals with distrust, even refusing assistance in some cases.
Under this model, each problem a family faces, it seems, is categorized-“at-risk,” “developmentally disabled,” “drug-addicted”-and attacked separately.
The underlying message to the poor is clear: The more problems you show us, the more attention we’ll give you. A person’s talents and capacities are worthless in this exchange.
“There’s something perverse about our system,” said Marvin Cohen, director of the Chicago Community Trust’s Children, Youth and Families Initiative. “Now, if you want to get services, you have to say something’s wrong with you. That’s absurd. We need to get to kids before something’s wrong with them.”
The result has been what McKnight calls “client neighborhoods,” where “residents come to believe that their well-being depends upon being a client. They begin to see themselves as people with special needs that can only be met by outsiders.”
“They become consumers of services, with no incentive to be producers,” McKnight has written in “Building Communities from the Inside Out,” a book he co-authored with John P. Kretzmann, a community development consultant.
Even worse, the two argue, residents begin to focus “vast amounts of creativity and intelligence on . . . outwitting the `system,’ or on finding ways-in the informal or even illegal economy-to bypass the system entirely.”
Obviously, chronic poverty, crime and joblessness can’t be solved with a handshake between neighbors. But in the current conservative political climate, limited resources must be spent in a way that maximizes community strengths that already exist. Otherwise, the power of communities will continue to be short-circuited or squandered by the overwhelming presence of needs-oriented social services.
Jacqueline Reed, executive director of the Westside Health Authority, recalled a simple example of this from last summer. Her grass-roots organization, which equips residents to help shape local health services and to promote healthy living in the community, was sponsoring an event at an Austin neighborhood church to honor parishioners who reached out to their neighbors.
During the event, three toddlers with dirty clothes and faces played in the middle of the street in front of the church. When Reed spotted the children and took them inside, parishioners cleaned them up and kept them until the mother arrived.
But rather than assisting the mother further, the church members called the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.
In years past, the church might have taken the family under its wing, said Reed, who has a master’s degree in social work.
“Those women really wanted to do the right thing,” she said. But “people are reluctant about getting involved because they see it as a responsibility of the state agency.”
Still, as Reed and community organizers know, thousands of people are quietly helping children grow up.
And, in contrast to bureaucracies that isolate problems, informal neighborhood efforts are not constrained by social service boundaries, a tenet of researchers at the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall Center for Children.
An after-school tutoring program at a church, for example, accepts all children as equals regardless of their development. Once there, children receive all kinds of assistance, from educational training to meals to moral teaching.
“Right now, a Little League coach and a mental health counselor don’t see themselves as being a part of the same business of helping kids, but we’re saying they are and they ought to work together,” said Joan Wynn, a Chapin Hall researcher.
Some social policy thinkers hold that it is not the nature of social programs but the government’s failure to fund them adequately that has been their demise.
And even as efforts build to help neighborhoods seize control of their destiny, another proposal is getting loud attention that advocates taking some children out of blighted neighborhoods altogether: to create new-style “orphanages” to care for them.
Still, the concept of encouraging and equipping residents to take greater authority for their community has support across ideological lines. Liberals see it as a way of empowering low-income people. Conservatives are attracted to its basic “boot-strap” appeal.
For citizens who may be overwhelmed by the problems of youths, small-scale, block-by-block efforts make the situation manageable, said Carole Pardo of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development in Chicago.
A parent patrol for children walking to school, for instance, won’t cause the local gang to disband, but it does tell the children of a neighborhood that responsible adults have not abdicated authority.
“It’s me calling the park district in my neighborhood and saying I want basketball nets up,” Pardo said. “It’s you getting the glass cleaned up at the park. Every neighborhood on a block-by-block basis can identify something they can do.”
Rebuilding that kind of community action will be difficult. Sweeping lifestyle changes have strained the informal systems of community care in both poor and prosperous communities.
More women, who by and large maintained these systems, work outside the home; families move more frequently; and people have smaller extended families to guide children.
And the exodus of working- and middle-class families from inner-city neighborhoods has left the poorest families out of touch with people who were available to share their resources when communities were more economically diverse.
Perhaps the greatest hindrance to community care of children, however, is fear. At a time when youngsters carry guns and drugs create volatile climates within homes and on the streets, people think twice about getting involved.
“I think that because people care so much, they feel more vulnerable to being exploited,” said Reed, of the Westside Health Authority. “So they won’t offer to take that dope addict’s children because the mother might come back on them.”
Moving beyond distrust takes not only compassion but “a whole lot of flexibility, a whole lot of tolerance and sort of minimal expectations for rewards,” she said.
Carmella Saraceno, for one, is trying to make her West Town neighborhood friendlier to children by introducing them to art. She is aware of her neighbors’ fears.
Nonetheless, she insists the primary responsibility for rescuing the children in her community and others like it falls squarely on the shoulders of the people who live there.
Saraceno often is approached by people from other neighborhoods asking if she can help them. This is what she tells them:
“You’re going to have to do it yourself. What you’re going to have to do is … know the person that lives next door to you. Then you’re going to have to know how old their kids are, where they go to school and what their interests are.
“And suddenly you’re going to realize you have a community.”
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NEXT: Strength in numbers. PHOTO (color): Quiet leaders, even in communities as bleak as the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago’s South Side, find they can make life better for children in small ways. Eliphalet Williams and her son Rudolph, 11, are part of a network of residents striving to make their Taylor building a friendlier place.
