Communities Speak project in San Francisco involves 20 groups and scores of individuals.
When you live in a neighborhood in California long enough, it's bound to change. Ask Maria Picar, a resident of the Ocean View section of San Francisco for most of her life. Once a predominantly African-American area, Ocean View has experienced an influx of immigrants over the past 25 years and, like California itself, has become incredibly diverse. "Now," says Picar, "when I walk down the street I'm just as apt to see Asians or Latinos as African-Americans."
Picar, executive director of the Arts Connection, a local after-school performing-arts program, and owner of her own arts studio, is playing a major role in a CCH-funded Communities Speak project involving Ocean View and two adjoining neighborhoods in the southwest corner of San Francisco, Merced Heights and Ingleside. Together the three urban neighborhoods, known collectively as OMI, make up one of the most diverse, and least-known, communities in the city.
Not far from Picar's house in Ocean View is another part of OMI, the upscale neighborhood of Ingleside Terraces. Here well-kept homes, some with sweeping Pacific Ocean views, fetch a million dollars or more in the red-hot San Francisco housing market, and many residents hold down jobs with six-figure salaries. This neighborhood stands in stark contrast to working-class Ocean View and other OMI areas, where some 20 percent of residents lack a high school diploma and 7 percent experience hunger.
In the 1990s, a community planning committee identified a number of problems facing OMI, including changing demographics, an increasing number of at-risk youth and a lack of basic services. Underlying the committee's findings was the belief that OMI needed to speak with a unified voice and act collectively to solve its problems. The CCH project, called I Am OMI, is using history and story-sharing as a way to help OMI residents come together as a community to find that voice and address those problems.
Many OMI groups working for change
Things are much better in OMI today than they used to be, according to Woody LaBounty, director of the I Am OMI project. In the 1980s and 1990s, OMI had a reputation for crack cocaine and violent crime. Those problems have diminished markedly today because of the dedication of people such as the late activist Lovie Lee Ward, who helped Ocean View residents reclaim a local park from drug dealers and garnered support to rebuild a run-down elementary school.
LaBounty, who heads the nonprofit Western Neighborhoods Project, an organization working to preserve and record the history of San Francisco's western neighborhoods, can point to a number of other individuals and groups working to improve OMI -- from block clubs and barbershop fraternities to political action committees and church groups.
" What we're doing with the OMI project is creating opportunities for the various OMI groups to come together," says LaBounty. "The organizations do great work, but they're more apt to focus on concerns in their own block rather than on those of the larger community, and they compete against each other for attention. The lack of unity hurts efforts to get better city services for OMI and solve other shared problems," he says.
Project to involve scores of residents and groups
The I Am OMI project is collecting stories from some 40-odd people in the community, including new immigrants and longtime residents. A longtime local historian, LaBounty particularly wants people to understand OMI's past.
" Many people probably don't know that OMI was an Italian, Irish and German area when it was established in the early 1900s, or that in the 1950s Ingleside was one of the few neighborhoods in the city that allowed homes to be sold to African-Americans or that a racetrack once occupied the site where Ingleside Terraces now stands.
" I want longtime residents to talk about what the neighborhood used to be like, how it's changed and their hopes for its future. And likewise I want newcomers to give their perspectives. Things have changed so rapidly that people don't know who their neighbors are anymore," LaBounty says.
LaBounty is also focusing on stories of people who have made a difference in the neighborhood. One of those is the Rev. Roland Gordon, of the Ingleside Presbyterian Church on Ocean Avenue, OMI's main shopping thoroughfare. Gordon revitalized the church, recently selected as one of the top 300 Protestant ministries in the nation, and established a community center and a basketball league for kids. But perhaps his greatest achievement is the collage he created in the gymnasium at the Ingleside Community Center. Called the Great Cloud of Witness, the collage covers all four walls of the gym -- from floor to ceiling -- and is made up of thousands of cutouts of black civil rights and cultural heroes.
The Danish-born Peter Vaernet is another neighborhood icon. Vaernet teamed up with his neighbors to clean up Brooks Park in the Merced Heights section of OMI. Once a popular spot for pit bull fights and drug deals, Brooks Park has been transformed into a safe place for seniors and families.
LaBounty has involved more than 20 groups in the OMI project, including Maria Picar's Arts Connection and the OMI Business League, which has been working since 1996 to attract more businesses to the community. Among the more than 50 volunteers are Agnes Morton, who is identifying people to interview; Al Harris, who is publicizing the project; and Karen McCabe, an independent filmmaker who is gathering local history. "The people in the community are the ones who are making the project happen," LaBounty says. "Even the local printer who produces our fliers is interested in what we're doing."
Stories to become a play and radio drama
Story-collecting activities are already under way and will continue until 2005. LaBounty is conducting many interviews himself but is also enlisting help from volunteers.
The interviews are being posted on the Western Neighborhoods Project's website (www.outsidelands.org) and eventually will be made available to the local branches of the San Francisco Public Library. The project will also publish a booklet featuring selected excerpts from the interviews as well a history of the area. The booklet will be distributed to more than 6,000 OMI residents free of charge.
The project is also sponsoring two digital video camps to involve the youth of OMI (see story, page one). The videos will be shown in local elementary school classrooms, at after-school programs and at OMI history days for groups and residents. A highlight of the project will be a theater piece based on the collected interviews. Leading the theatrical effort will be longtime OMI resident Maria Picar, with help from Norita Gonzalez-Blum, Florentina Mocanu-Schendel, and writer Jason Rogers. The play will be adapted for radio and broadcast on a local radio station in September 2004.
LaBounty is working nonstop to pull all the pieces of the project together. But it appears to be a labor of love. "Of all the neighborhoods on the west side of San Francisco, OMI is the one most in need of having its history told and shared," LaBounty says. "It's a lot of work, but if the project inspires just a few people to look at OMI differently, I'll feel that I have done something worthwhile."
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To find out more about the I Am OMI project, visit the Western Neighborhoods Project website at www.outsidelands.org or send e-mail to Woody LaBounty at Woody@outsidelands.org.
OMI historical photos courtesy of Greg Gaar and Western Neighborhoods Project.