People from all over Springfield plan to meet
this Saturday morning at Laurel United Methodist Church, at the
corner of Walnut Street and South Grand Avenue. They won’t be
there to pray; instead, after a breakfast of coffee, juice, and
doughnuts, they’ll get their marching orders and spend the
rest of the day hard at work — for no pay.
These volunteers will gather for Sprucing Up
Springfield, a community project organized by the Springfield
Community Federation. Launched eight years ago, Sprucing Up
Springfield is one of the federation’s two annual
neighborhood-transformation projects. The other, Miracles on 13th
Street, takes place Aug. 2.
Last year, the task of coordinating Sprucing
Up Springfield and Miracles was assigned to federally funded
AmeriCorps volunteers based at the Dr. Edwin A. Lee Resource
Center, 501 S. 13th St., which also serves as SCF’s home.
Soon after AmeriCorps events coordinator Amy
Chase arrived in September, fresh from college, she invited all
Springfield-area neighborhood associations to apply for the 2005
effort.
Only one association could be selected, but
early concern about a deluge of applications proved unfounded. Only
one applied: the Vinegar Hill Neighborhood Association, formerly
known as the Central City Neighborhood Association.
The project had been explained to members
during the November 2004 meeting, and members enthusiastically
voted to apply to participate.
When William Castor III, the
association’s current president, took office in January,
Vinegar Hill members were tapped to serve on several Sprucing Up Springfield committees with
responsibilities ranging from feeding volunteers to identifying
projects.
“Our biggest challenge was to find
enough resident homeowners with work to be done,” Castor
says. “We were offering help with gutter cleaning, minor
improvements, trimming, and planting, but people were unfamiliar
with Sprucing Up Springfield, and they were reluctant to get
involved.
“On the other hand, volunteers came out
of the woodwork, thanks in part to Betty Green who led our part of
the volunteer recruitment,” Castor says. AmeriCorps
volunteers also worked on all aspects of planning the event and
made most initial contacts of area businesses.
Charlene Edmiston, executive director of SCF,
participated in the first Sprucing Up Springfield and has watched
it evolve from an event that required part-time attention from
several of her staff employees to the better-focused project it has
been for the past two years, thanks to the full-time AmeriCorps
coordinator.
All federation employees will be volunteering
to help May 14.
“Sprucing Up Springfield has never
consisted of a bunch of us [social workers] going into a
neighborhood and telling them what we’re going to do,”
she says. “It’s a partnership between SCF, residents in
the neighborhoods, and others in the community. Residents decide
what is to be done. . . . Developing neighborhood unity and
neighborhood revitalization is what this is all about.”
Edmiston echoes Castor’s early angst.
“Getting neighbors to sign up to be
helped is always the biggest challenge,” she says.
The neighborhood association has identified seven major projects, including the placement of
a privacy fence, and about 20 minor projects for this Saturday. Some
cleanup tasks cannot be tackled by the Sprucing Up Springfield
volunteers. Nothing can be done on private property without the
permission of the property owner.
The volunteers also aren’t sure
they’ll be able to remove yard waste and other garbage; the
coordinators are trying to address that problem.
“When something is put back right,
it’s more apt that it will be maintained that way,”
Edmiston says. “There was a study made where they purposely
broke a window at an abandoned house, and soon other abandoned
houses had broken windows. When they repaired a window, other
windows were repaired.
“Decay is contagious. So is sprucing
up.”
Job Conger is a former Vinegar Hill
president.
This article appears in May 12-18, 2005.
