A Changing Community

The focus of this blog will be on the idea of communities. This discussion is extremely relevant to my ongoing service project as much of it has focused in the Washington Neighborhood. Many residents of the Washington Neighborhood are striving to transform the community into a much better place to live and raise families. However, this seems to be a continual ongoing process with no end in sight in the upcoming years. I believe that the people of the Washington Neighborhood are working as best as possible to improve their community, yet they are encountering the problems faced by any group that is attempting to transform an area. The only way in which a community can transform itself is to have every resident willing and able to help in the revitalization. This goal is nearly unachievable as there is almost a constant movement of people in and out of residencies in a neighborhood as large as the Washington Neighborhood. If there are any people in the community that do not care about improving the neighborhood and simply do nothing, then it will be nearly impossible for any goals or change to be achieved. Due to these reasons, change occurs gradually over time and cannot be obtained in relatively short periods of time.

I believe that my experience of helping to clean up the Washington Neighborhood for an entire Saturday morning allowed me to see some of the improvements that are being made and some that need to be made in the future for the revitalization to be complete. There were many homes that were in very good shape and it was obvious that the homeowners tried to keep them in working order. However, there were some properties that looked rundown and completely ignored. I know that the Washington Neighborhood has a policy of forcing residents to keep in the front of houses in good appearance as a way of trying to promote a better aesthetic look for the area. After walking through the alleys, it was obvious that many residents simply do not care what their houses look like and until that changes, the view of the neighborhood will not change. I can see that there are many residents that have taken an active role in attempting to promote change and have spent a lot of time to achieve the goals of the neighborhood. Unfortunately, until the push for change is taken up by every resident, the neighborhood will never fully reach its goals.

The narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is able to bring about change within in Harlem by simply making sympathetic speeches to its citizens. The narrator is able to do this despite not being an extremely well known public figure at the beginning of his active life. Ralph Ellison is trying to tell his readers that the key to promoting change within a community is to unite the residents under one goal. This happens in Ellison’s book through a relatively unknown speaker that ignites the people to push for change. He is able to talk about issues that may not directly affect the people, but he is able to convince them that it is in their best interests to think and act in a particular manner. By being an unknown person, the people become willing to take action on their own rather than simply following a leader. If this type of person would reveal themselves in the Washington Neighborhood, there would be a much better chance that the community would change. A leader could act as a gathering point and ignite the majority of people to really strive for improvement in their community.