Spring Cleaning with GPNA: On April 24, over 60 residents, business owners teamed up with Calvin faculty, staff and students for some spring cleaning in Garfield Park/Burton Heights. The event was a great success. The weather was beautiful and everyone seemed to enjoy the experience. GPNA also provided seven large dumpsters for residents to use for large trash items. The event occured in partnership with Raise the Roof Day, which was coordinated by Home Repair Services.

Burton Heights Neighborhood Plan

The Burton Heights Neighborhood has just finished the Burton Heights Neighborhood Plan. Its purpose was to meet the challenges of a changing neighborhood by bringing people together to develop a set of strategies for neighborhood improvement. The planning process was very successful in that it provided a chance for residents and community members to give direction to the police, city offices, and nonprofit organizations working in the neighborhood. Friendships were built among the participants and a sense of community prode was built.

The project was spearheaded by Garfield Development Corporation through a contract with the City of Grand Rapids in partnership with the Garfield Park Neighborhoods Association. Calvin students, faculty, and staff have had the opportunity to be a part of this project throughout its entirety. Two Calvin faculty members sat on the steering committee from the very start and students and classes have participated along the way.

Calvin involvement in the neighborhood planning process:

At the start of the planning process it was difficult to organize working groups of community members to begin the planning process. Two Calvin work study students, Amber Vander Molen and Jessica Coleman, interning with Garfield Development Corporation in the summer of 2003 helped to create a database of residents and their interests by surveying the entire Burton Heights neighborhood. They knocked on 1,639 doors and talked with 579 households. By the end of the summer with these students' help, enough interested residents and community members were indentified and recruited for the working groups to begin.

In the Fall 03 semester four students from SOWK 372 assisted the planning process by working with the Housing Working Group. They helped to spread word of the meetings and talk with residents to identify key leaders to represent the neighborhood in the working group. The students were able to gain some hands-on experience working with neighborhood organizations and the community while assisting the people of Burton Heights.

Also in the Fall 03 semester, Henk Aay's Urban Geography class (GEOG 310) worked with the Traffic Working Group, the Grand Rapids Department of Traffic Safety and the Grands Rapids Engineering Department on two projects arising from the traffic planning process. The first group worked with Burton Heights' residents to develop several alternatives to deal with traffic complaints and beautification in order to make Burton Street more of a "gateway" into the Burton Heights neighborhood. The other group focused on the Division Corridor which is currently in the design phase of a three year reconstruction project. They worked with residents, Traffic Safety representatives abd City Engineers to develop design suggestions focused on designing the street to be more pedestrian friendly. These suggestions were considered by the community and presented to the city through the Neighborhood Plan.

Spring '04 Community Organizing Projects:

Lead Education: The class, Generalist Practice with Organization and Communities (SOWK 372), taught by Lissa Schwander will work with community organizations such as Garfield Development Corporation, the SouthEast Community Outreach Ministries (SECOM), the Garfield Park Neighborhoods Association to plan and organize an educational campaign problems associatied with lead based paint and available resources for lead abatement. The idea for this project came out of concerns expressed by residents in the neighborhood planning process.

Spanish and English Language Assistance Programs: Calvin student Jessica Coleman was recently hired as the Calvin at Burton Heights Assistant Coordinator to assist the neighborhood in researching language assistance programs. She is working on gathering information about successful language resource programs in existance in Grand Rapids and elsewhere, updating and building a database of ESL programs available to the Burton Heights neighborhood, building a list of programs available to residents interested in learning Spanish, and talking with neighborhood residents, business owners and other key neighborhood leaders about language needs.

Language assistance programs are growing in importance as the Burton Heights neighborhood experiences drastic demographic shifts. 1990 census data indicated that of the three largest population groups in hte Burton Heights area (census tracts 38 and 40), 26% of people were Hispanic, 17% were African American, and 61% Caucasian. By 2000 these same data sets showed 63% of Burton Heights residents to be Hispanic, 12% African American, and 21% Caucasian. With this demographic shift, the language barrier between residents is growing and with this growth comes new opportunities and new challenges.

At Buchanan Elementary School, one of the partners in the Calvin at Burton Heights program, 65% of students in 2000 were learning English as a second language with Spanish as their primary language. Also, according to the 200 census data for tracts 38 and 40, 59% of residents sopke Spanish primarily with varying degrees of English ability. The other 41% of Burton Heights residents sopke only English.

Throughout the neighborhood planning processs preliminary research was conducted about hte state of lanugage assistance resources in the neighborhood and informal discussions about the topic occured with several different groups of commuity members. It was determined through this process that there is a significant need for the development of Spanish langage resources for English speakers wishing to learn Spanish and a system of organization ofr Spanish speaker wishing to find an appropriate English program. The Calvin at Burton Heights program is helping to address this problem through the research oriented Assistant Coordinator position.

New Language Classes: Starting on March 11, the Calvin ar Burton Heights partnership program together with Garfield Development Corporation will begin to hold English and Spanish as a second language classes. An English and a Spanish class will be taught simultaneously so that the classes can be combined for the purpose of conversation practice in the final section of each class period. Calvin students and the Calvin staff are participating as tutors in this innovative program.