Cultivating Community

By Ricardo Tavárez

It’s Wednesday, August 6th. Evening is descending on the home base of New City Neighbors, the youth development organization I lead in northeast Grand Rapids. Residents of our neighborhood join the youth in our summer program for an interactive panel discussion with local community leaders. The organization’s urban farm and farmhouse provide the ambiance for our guests, including the student-prepared visuals related to the asset mapping of our Creston neighborhood that are on display. With temperatures reaching past eighty degrees Fahrenheit, nearly fifty people are gathered outdoors in the warmth of the fading sunlight to listen to the experiences of the panelists. The theme for the evening is Cultivating Community. 

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Community organizing, food access work, physical health and mental health services are just some of the areas of expertise represented on the panel. The leaders respond to questions including, “How do you define a healthy community in our context?” and “How do you build trust across diverse interest groups within a neighborhood?” The final question is asked by a teen in our program: “What advice would you give to someone just starting out in community development or asset-based work?” All the discussion has moved us in a single direction. Increasing the health and well-being of a community is work that requires intention and patience. It takes years. This has certainly been our experience at New City Neighbors.

Over the last few years, New City Neighbors has been shaping its curriculum and programming experiences to help youth identify social challenges in our community and how to begin to address those challenges. With the fact that everyone needs to eat, and with our urban farm providing a much-needed food resource in our area (over 20,000 pounds of produce grown on our farm goes to local food resource centers), we have a great launching point for education around community transformation and empowerment. But we ask our youth to dig deeper as they find their voice and prepare themselves to launch out into the world.

Students in our school-year leadership course responded to our invitation to dig deeper with a request to create an asset map of our neighborhood, which is partially funded by Health Equity Initiative. They wanted to spend more time learning about the resources available in our area. They also wanted to think critically about how to network and leverage those resources for the well-being of the community at large. Thus began the ongoing student asset mapping project at New City Neighbors with preliminary assets being included in the map linked below. 
Map Link

Each year students in our leadership cohort will build on the knowledge of their predecessors by exploring our neighborhood and adding more to the collective asset map. While this seems like a simple exercise, our students are doing it with intention. Consequently, we have responded by shaping our summer curriculum to include the exploration and understanding of the resources currently available in the Creston neighborhood and how the engineering of community networks and resources for the good can lead to positive systems change and community transformation. Of great importance is also to explore how the youth perceive these assets, how they use them, and what kinds of improvements or new resources may be crucial to youth development and community transformation. 

Our vision at New City Neighbors is growing neighborhood leaders. This summer, we watched this growth in real time. 

Image Credit: Courtesy of New City Neighbors. Used by permission.

*New City Neighbors is a 2024-2025 grantee partner of Health Equity Initiative, which also includes unrestricted funding for this blog post.  

Author’s Bio
Ricardo Tavárez was named as one of the 40 under 40 business leaders by the Grand Rapids Business Journal in 2022 for his work on community transformation. He is the Executive Director of New City Neighbors, a non-profit in West Michigan using urban farming as a catalyst for urban development. 
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