Learning from Neighborhoods: The Story of the Hampton Initiative, 1993-2003
Transcript of Learning from Neighborhoods: The Story of the Hampton Initiative, 1993-2003
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LEARNING FROM NEIGHBORHOODS
WRITTEN BY
MICHAEL BAYER
HNTB
WIL LIAM POTAPCHUK
COMMUNITY BUILDING INSTITUTE
THE STORY OF
THE HAMPTON
NEIGHBORHOOD
INITIATIVE, 1993-2003
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THE HAMPTON NEIGHBORHOOD INITIATIVE, 1993-2003 •1
imagineIMAGINE THE FIRST ACT OF A DISHEARTENING SCRIPT THAT HAS PLAYED OUT IN MANY CITIES
OVER A PERIOD OF DECADES: CITY GOVERNMENT ACTS UNILATERALLY AND ARROGANTLY IN
NEIGHBORHOODS. Citizen leaders organize to block city initiatives they think have not beenthought through. City government tries again, this time with superficial citizen involvement.
Neighborhood leaders see through the ruse. City officials, frustrated by citizens opposing
them, continue doing their work the same way, with attitude. Neighborhood organizations,
home to cynics who like fighting City Hall, stagnate. Neighborhoods decline.
Usually, the next act begins under the title: “City leaders organize a neighborhood
initiative.” In most cases, citizens react as they have so many times in the past: What is the
city trying to foist on us now?
What does a c ity that does not want to repeat this script do?
How can City Hall change so citizens want to work with it?
How do neighborhood leaders accustomed to fighting city-driven initiatives begin to
trust City Hall and choose to form partnerships — with the city, other neighborhoods andother agencies?
It’s not easy. But one of the oldest cities in the United States — HAMPTON, VIRGINIA — is in
the midst of decade-long renaissance that has transformed the way citizens, city hall, schools
and community-based organizations come together to improve their neighborhoods…
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
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began to change. Maybe there was
something to it.
Attending Neighborhood College
“made you sit and think that maybe
other things could happen in our
neighborhoods, that maybe relation-
ships could be different,” he said. “I
found it to be a mind-broadening
experience, and thought, maybe I
have to start thinking outside of thebox I’m used to.”
Bigelow decided to give the new
neighborhood initiative a chance and
began to participate, as a partner.
If Bigelow were a lone convert, this
story would be a short one. But he’s
not. Throughout Hampton are scores
of neighborhood leaders who have
participated in the Neighborhoods
Initiative and have undergone similar
transitions in their thinking.
“I thought it was eyewash,” said
Andre McCloud, a resident of the
Greater Wythe neighborhood whonow serves on the Neighborhood
Commission. “It was only after I went
that I realized how much I did not
know about the city. It really opened
my eyes.”
In time, Bigelow and McCloud
would become two of the initiative’s
most ardent supporters. Today, 10
years later, Bigelow sees a changed
climate in Hampton.
“As neighborhood leaders, we’re
talking with city officials, we’re
working with City Hall, and we’re
accomplishing our goals throughout
the city,” he said. “We see that we can
approach issues positively and get
things done, and I think most civic
group leaders who have worked with
the initiative would tell you that.”
Neighborhood leaders are not the
only ones who have changed. While
the popular press touts corporatetransformations from GE to IBM,
similar efforts within public sector
organizations often are overlooked. In
Hampton, that change is profound.
Not only have staff throughout
government changed their attitudes
and enhanced their ability to work
with neighborhoods, they have
changed the way the organization
works to foster sustained collabora-
tive efforts with communities.
The initiative’s successes are
tangible: a community center
functioning in a long-shutteredschool, a museum celebrating the
history of the only resettlement
community in the United States
designed and constructed by
African-Americans; a learning center
in a former bar; neighborhoods
stabilized and on the rise.
Neighborhoods have achieved their
goals by mustering resources they
would not have been able to access
without collaborating with the city.
From the city’s perspective, the initia-
tive has helped to identify neighbor-
hood needs and priorities and allocate
limited resources that are not only
responsive to neighborhood priorities,
but leverage resources from citizens,
community based organizations,
schools, businesses and other partners.
The successes are intangible, too:
new and rich networks of citizens and
city officials who know and trust oneanother and are willing to work
together when a crisis arises.
In this document, we tell the
stories of Hampton’s Neighborhoods
Initiative during its first 10 years,
the elements upon which the initia-
tive is built, and the lessons
that the city and neighbor-
hoods have learned
during this innova-
tive experiment in
civic involvement.
But the story is
far from over.In the final
analysis, perhaps the most important
lesson is that Hampton is still
changing, still improving, still
learning. The effort to improve neigh-
borhoods has evolved constantly, in
the community as well as within local
government. And the evolution is not
done, as neighborhood leaders in
Hampton continue to address an
evolving set of challenges.
Although the goal of building
relationships has been realized,
the work of building relationships
and reaching out in new ways is
never done.
Act three is just beginning. ■
THE HAMPTON NEIGHBORHOOD INITIATIVE, 1993-2003 •3
“As neighborhood leaders,
we’re talking with city officials,
we’re working with City Hall,
and we’re accomplishing our goalsthroughout the city…”
—ANDY BIGELOW
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ampton, a city of just under
150,000 people, shares a penin-
sula with its neighbor, Newport
News, at the southern end of the
Chesapeake Bay. The city offers some
of the most affordable urban opportu-
nities among bayside communities for
people wanting to live near the water.
That is good news and bad.
Hampton, like many other juris-dictions in Virginia, is heavily
dependent upon real estate taxes to
balance the city budget. The value
and condition of its housing stock,
therefore, are vital to the city’s fiscal
health, and this asset is at risk.
In the early 1990s, the issue
became clear. According to the 1990
census, housing values in Hampton
were among the lowest in the
Hampton Roads region, a wakeup call
for a city that, at the time, was
becoming a poster child for the
reinventing government movement.“The statistics scared us,” said then
Mayor James Eason. “We knew we
could not continue this decline.
Otherwise we were going to be like
some cities in Virginia that we did not
want to be like.”1
Effective neighborhood initiatives
rarely emerge from a vacuum; rather,
a history, a set of conditions, and a
mobilization of public and political
will coalesce into a commitment to
create, staff and fund what for many
jurisdictions can become a major
focus over a long period of time.
Hampton was no exception. While
the disheartening data from the 1990
census may have been the trigger,
Hampton had been headed toward
more proactive work in neighbor-
hoods for several years.
Indeed, the history of Hampton’s
Neighborhoods Initiative starts withthe city’s efforts in 1987 to update its
Comprehensive Plan, the policy
document that guides land use and
development in the city. One of the
major proposals in the draft plan was
a new east-west expressway. And, as it
had been each time this idea was
raised before, the community was
angry.
Joan Kennedy, then Director of
Planning, remembers:
I had just done my spiel about how
the comprehensive plan is the commu-
nity’s vision. But when I looked around,there was just this sea of angry faces out
there. I thought this must come a lot
closer to being these people’s nightmare
rather than their vision.2
Not only were residents angry
about the road, they were upset that
they had not been consulted about
the plan before it was publicized.
Rather than pushing forward with the
plan as many jurisdictions do, city
manager Bob O’Neill took a step back.
Meeting with neighborhood leaders,
he proposed a consensus building
process. Neighbors agreed, on two
conditions: “City Council had to
publicly support the process and the
proposed highway had to be removed
from the plan and not reconsidered
unless the consensus committee
agreed to it.”3
Facilitated by assistant city
manager Mike Monteith, a diverse setof stakeholders reached consensus on
a revised Comprehensive Plan,
agreeing to preserve the proposed
road’s right of way as a park until the
traffic on adjacent roads reached
certain levels, at which time the road
would be built.
The effort was viewed by many as
a great success. Monteith described
the reactions of staff:
The planners were amazed; the
results were more creative than
anything they had done previously.
When the community has an equal voicewith you, you have to really debate the
planning issues, to figure out how to
meet everybody’s requirements. That’s
when you really get creative.
And then he summed up:
There’s no doubt it was the most
successful comp plan we’ve had to
date… It is the only one that has dealt
with controversial issues in a long-term,
and not a short-term way.
This was the beginning of the
changing relationship between neigh-
4 • LEARNING FROM NEIGHBORHOODS
H
HOUSING VALUES,
ROAD FIGHTS
AND YOUTH ISSUES
SPAWN AN INITIATIVE
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bors and City Hall. Said Jim Dick, a
neighborhood representative to the
consensus committee, “When the
process was initiated, it was a kind of
us-against-them mentality. You could
see it on both sides. Once everyone
started recognizing each other as
individuals, we could discuss issues
and deal with them.”
Linda McNeely, another partici-pant who was later elected to City
Council, concluded: “The biggest
thing I got out of the consensus group
was that the city government and staff
were not the enemy.”
The success with the consensus-
based conflict resolution process
inspired the initial paradigm shift in
planning processes in Hampton.
Senior staff from throughout city
government were trained in facilita-
tion skills; the planning department
began to involve citizens in neighbor-
hood planning; and, despite a subse-quent stumble on an effort that
sought consensus on solid waste
issues, this type of participatory
process was growing legs.
About the same time, another set
of activities received federal funding.
In 1990, the US Department of Health
and Human Services Center for
Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP),
which had been making important
investments in communities during
the late 1980s and early ‘90s, funded a
THE HAMPTON NEIGHBORHOOD INITIATIVE, 1993-2003 •5
HAMPTON ROADS REGION
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project in Hampton. Starting life as
the Families and Youth At-Risk
Initiating Committee, the Hampton
Coalition for Youth (as it became
known) grew into an impor-
tant springboard for neigh-
borhood action.
The broad-based coalition,
which sought to improve
opportunities for youth anddecrease risky behavior,
engaged adults, youth,
nonprofits, the faith commu-
nity, and city leaders in a
multi-year learning, planning
and action process. Their
work was inspired by an
emerging national youth
development field that focused on
creating healthy environments that
support youth.
Coalition leaders took to heart a
simple but profound statement
from the Search Institute, a leader inthe field of youth development:
“Communities do make a difference
in the lives of youth. And many of the
contributing factors are within a
community’s control.”4
The coalition’s work culminated in
a 1993 report to the mayor, which
included a “Neighborhood Initiatives
Program” as one of four major recom-
mendations. The report framed many
of the principles that ultimately
shaped Hampton’s neighborhood
initiative: a commitment to involving
youth, an asset-based approach, and a
recognition that schools served as the
center of most neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, Hampton’s govern-
ment was being reinvented, one
stultifying bureaucratic process after
another. City Manager Bob O’Neill,
with the support of Mayor Eason and
the Hampton City Council, believedthat “the fundamental transformation
of public systems and organizations to
create dramatic increases in their
effectiveness, efficiency, adaptability,
and capacity to innovate” was not
only possible, they were going to
make it happen in their own
backyard.5
“Luckily for us, Hampton has been
blessed with city managers and
councils that encouraged experimen-
tation,” Monteith said. “The city
manager was not happy unless the
staff was re-creating the wheel everyday. We had a corporate expectation
to push the envelope, and that helped
us significantly.”
One of the tenets of the
reinventing government movement
was the recognition that ‘one size does
not fit all,’ a principle that would
underlie Hampton’s neighborhood
efforts. Federal policies that treated all
cities in the same manner no longer
were viewed as effective. City govern-
ment policies that addressed all
neighborhoods in the same way were
not effective either. A city council that
built community centers in every
neighborhood, for example, without
first asking the neighborhoods
whether this was important to them
would not be making the best invest-
ment of public resources.
While national recognition was
still over the horizon, efforts that had
started in the late 1980s were already
taking hold. Like many cities thatwere reinventing themselves,
Hampton officials debated their vision
statement for almost a year, culmi-
nating with one that is simple and
bold: “To be the most livable city
in Virginia.” ■
6 • LEARNING FROM NEIGHBORHOODS
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THE HAMPTON NEIGHBORHOOD INITIATIVE, 1993-2003 •7
t is against this backdrop that, in
1993, the mayor declared in his
state of the city address that neighbor-
hoods would be one of the city’s four
most important priorities. But priori-
ties do not make a program, and city
leaders were bucking the same
national trends that were challenging
other communities. City decision-
makers had recognized a shift indecision-making from the national,
state and local scales to the global,
regional and neighborhood arenas. If
Hampton were to prosper, under this
line of thinking, neighborhoods had
to be empowered to identify their
own agendas and carry them out.
Moreover, the leadership structure
in many American cities had been
changing from top-down to bottom-
up. No longer were cities dominated
by one or more corporations that
determined the course of city politics
and ensured that local needs weremet. As the relative power and influ-
ence of these corporations waned, a
vacuum was created and neighbor-
hoods were “not prepared to make
decisions, so the city had to do
something to help them get
prepared,” Eason said.
These factors, coupled with a
potentially dire housing and
employment outlook, made it clear
to city officials that, despite their
best efforts to reinvent city govern-
ment, Hampton did not and would
not have all of the resources it
needed to meet the needs of its
neighborhoods without working
with them. To create the kind of city
that citizens wanted, city govern-
ment would have to collaborate with
the citizens to set priorities and
determine how best to fulfill each
neighborhood’s (and, by extension,the city’s) most pressing needs.
As city leaders tried to accomplish
this goal, however, it became clear
that they did not know what the
neighborhoods’ priorities were, much
less which citizens were willing to
partner. Not only did city government
lack an effective system for working
with neighborhoods, the neighbor-
hoods themselves were not organized
in a way that ensured their leaders
truly were representing the people
within their borders. City staff did not
discover the second problem untilthey tried to deal with the first.
“What was clear up front was that
the city was never going to have the
resources necessary to meet all neigh-
borhood needs unless we got into an
active partnership with neighbor-
hoods,” said Bob O’Neill, who left
Hampton in 1997 and now serves as
executive director of the International
City/County Management Association
in Washington D.C. “And even if our
resources were not limited, we were
still missing neighborhood priorities,
so we also had to build community
leadership to discover them.”
To identify neighborhood priori-
ties, new lines of communication
between city government and neigh-
borhoods, and leadership and collab-
oration within neighborhoods would
need to be created and fostered. As
these needs became clearer, theconcept of a neighborhood initiative
began to take form.
Fortunately, Hampton was well
positioned to move ahead. To many in
Hampton, collaborating with neigh-
borhoods seemed like a natural step.
In some older neighborhoods,
Hampton residents traditionally had
identified with their neighborhoods
and carried a strong sense of neigh-
borhood pride. The City Council had
reinforced these feelings over the
years through policies aimed at
strengthening and supporting neigh-borhoods.
Several key staff, including Joan
Kennedy, Mike Monteith, and Cindy
Carlson from the Hampton Coalition
for Youth, worked together to develop
a description of the Department of
Neighborhood Services. ■
FRAMING
THE INITIATIVE
I
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o move the idea forward, City
Manager Bob O’Neill appointed
a committee (known as the “initiating
committee”) to design the process of
working with neighborhoods and
identify members of the public who
would serve on a steering committee,
which would take on the task of
determining how to structure the
initiative. At the same time, the CityCouncil established the Department
of Neighborhood Services (soon
renamed the Neighborhood Office),
staffed by Joan Kennedy and three
neighborhood facilitators.
The Neighborhood Office’s initial
work plan was straightforward. Staff
would spend the first year working
with the steering committee to
design the neighborhood initiative
and figure out what the office was
going to do. They would develop an
organizational structure, gather
information about neighborhoods,launch some initial programs,
monitor how well the programs
were being carried out, and develop
some early “lessons learned” that
could be applied to the program’s
design. If all went well, in the
second year, the office would be
prepared to develop a set of three
neighborhood plans, then continue
on a schedule to draft three plans
each year until every neighborhood
in Hampton had one.
At least that was the idea. But as
soon as the office opened, a line began
forming at the door.
Many neighborhood leaders were
eager to be served, so many, in fact,
that Kennedy and her staff decided to
change their approach. Each neigh-
borhood that came in became a pilot,
so residents would not have to wait
for services as the city developed theprogram design. This provided the
Neighborhood Office with “laborato-
ries” where they could apply the ideas
that staff and the steering committee
were developing on their own as well
as gathering from other communities.
“We didn’t say ‘no’ to any neigh-
borhood,” Kennedy said. “Our
original plan was to be very struc-
tured, but that was when we didn’t
know anything about neighborhood
work. This is a very messy business
and you have to be very flexible.”
The office began working witheight pilot neighborhoods —
Aberdeen Gardens, Park Place, Old
North Hampton, North Back River,
Eason Park, Wythe, Wythe-Phenix
and Newtown – and from these early
efforts, staff developed a set of obser-
vations that were contrary to some of
the commonly held assumptions
about neighborhoods. It was these
lessons, much more than national
research, that determined the final
design of the neighborhood initiative:
■ Many neighborhoods that appear
visually or statistically most distressed
often have the richest human assets;
their residents have a long history of
taking care of one another.
■ People will invest themselves in their
neighborhoods, some at great incon-
venience and some despite great fear.
■ People do not always blame others
for neighborhood problems or claim
others should do all the work. They
commonly look to themselves and
their neighbors to make things better
and seek to enlist the support of the
police, the churches, the schools and
the city in their efforts.
■ When asked open-ended questions
about life in neighborhoods, people
talk first about safety, a sense of
community, youth, jobs and good
housing. Many of these concerns arehighly symbolic and can be addressed
readily with existing resources.
■ When they talk about safety, many
people in fact are asking for a
different relationship with their police
officer. They want someone they
know, someone who will be part of
making their neighborhood safer,
someone they can reach out to.
8 • LEARNING FROM NEIGHBORHOODS
T
NEIGHBORHOODS
LINE UP
AS OFFICE
OPENS
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■ Many neighborhoods understand and
desire the concept of ‘partnership.’
The greater challenge to them is
changing the mindset of government.
These observations became the
assumptions upon which the initia-
tive was built and provided a context
that distinguished Hampton’s
approach. ■
THE HAMPTON NEIGHBORHOOD INITIATIVE, 1993-2003 •9
CITY OF HAMPTON NEIGHBORHOOD DISTRICTS
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10 • LEARNING FROM NEIGHBORHOODS
GUIDING
PRINCIPLES
s they moved ahead on the
design, city staff and the
steering committee asked themselves
many questions, trying to look at the
problem from every angle: How do
we define a neighborhood? Which
neighborhoods should participate
first? How does city government
prepare neighborhoods to participate
in this process? How do we developpartnerships? How do we focus on
youth? What is the best way to take
a holistic approach to the idea of
neighborhood “health”?
After a year of study and experi-
ence of working with neighbor-
hoods, the steering committee, with
input from the Neighborhood
Office, concluded that the initiative
would have the best chance to
succeed if it had a clear philosophy
or set of values that articulated a
new vision of neighborhoods andthe human, physical and intangible
resources within them.
The committee envisioned a city
“where individuals and families, by
creating healthy neighborhoods,
have the opportunity to succeed in
realizing their full potential for a
better quality of life.” The committee
was especially adamant that the
initiative would be about creating
“opportunities,” not “doing to or
for” neighborhoods. Instead, the
vision would be realized by acting ona set of principles that would
underlie the entire initiative:
A
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THE HAMPTON NEIGHBORHOOD INITIATIVE, 1993-2003 •11
PARTNERSHIP
By supporting partnerships among
neighborhoods, schools, businesses,
community institutions and govern-
ment, the city could help to provide
neighborhoods with resources that
could make a difference but not
provide all the resources itself. Theidea was to maximize the ability of
neighborhoods to help themselves
and minimize the use of experts from
outside the neighborhoods.
This type of partnership would
require a new type of relationship
between neighborhoods and the city,
based on a willingness of both city
government and neighborhoods to
collaborate. City government would
have to be willing to enter into long-
term relationships with neighbor-
hoods and not be tempted to try
quick fixes. Neighborhoods,meanwhile, would have to avoid
reverting to the old model of “we
complain and the city should deliver.”
INCLUSIVENESS
Every neighborhood should have
an opportunity to participate in the
initiative. Similarly, all citizens and
other stakeholders should be invited
to participate in any activity related to
the initiative.
Inclusiveness was important for avery practical reason. If the city were
to enter into partnerships with neigh-
borhoods and carry out changes in
physical or social structures, then the
city had a responsibility to ensure that
the partnerships were genuine, and
that neighborhood representation was
not limited to a vocal few. This
principle would be applied citywide
(by including all neighborhoods) and
within neighborhoods themselves (by
offering the opportunity to everyone
who would be affected by decisions in
the decision making process).
COMPREHENSIVENESS
A neighborhood’s quality of life is
not limited to bricks and mortar.
Thus, neighborhood efforts should
not be limited to physical improve-
ments. A healthy neighborhood feels
safe and supports the needs of its
residents for social interaction, recre-
ation, education, civic involvement
and access to goods and services.
A FOCU S ON YOUT H AND FAMI LIE S
Traditionally in Hampton, youth
and families had been viewed as
separate from neighborhoods, schools
and local government. Services and
resources had been targeted narrowly,
most often in response to crises. But
strengthening and supporting youth
and families should happen where
people live.
Neighborhoods, therefore, would
be viewed as resources for families.
This “youth focus” would not be
something done for youth. Rather,youth would be involved in
designing and carrying out the
programs and opportunities that
would be available to them.
RECOGNIZING UNIQUENESS
Only a neighborhood can define
what makes it healthy. Therefore, the
initiative would attempt to appreciate
the culture, heritage, character, assets
and aspirations of every neighbor-
hood in the city.
…strengthening
and supporting
youth and families
should happen
where people live.
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12 • LEARNING FROM NEIGHBORHOODS
BUILDING ON STRENGTHS
In the past, city government had
focused on problems, because, by
identifying problems, the city could
intervene, which brought money and
attention to neighborhoods. But
through this process, the city effec-
tively had taught neighborhoods tovalue their problems.
Instead of focusing on what neigh-
borhoods did not have or could not
do, the initiative would focus on the
ability and capacity of neighborhoods
to shape their own futures, in the
concept the city called “asset orienta-
tion,” or viewing residents and neigh-
borhoods as producers, not
consumers. These “assets” include
the skills, gifts, knowledge, energy,
resources and values that citizens
bring to their neighborhoods, both
individually and collectively. Throughthe initiative, the city would tap these
assets to fill gaps it could not address
with city resources.
PLANNING WITH ACT ION
Because neighborhood planning
can be a long and complex process,
citizens looking for quick action can
become frustrated. To balance the
need to be deliberative about
complex and expensive issues yet
show some immediate progress,
planning efforts would include
short-term actions that everyone
could readily agree to, on issues
where the resources were readily
available, such as neighborhood
cleanups, or neighborhood signs.
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Because the initiative would rely
on the strengths and abilities of
citizens to identify priorities and help
to carry out plans, developing leader-
ship would be critical to its success.
Several programs or “building blocks”
would be created to develop neigh-
borhood leadership and strengthen
their skill set.
LISTENING
Finally, for the initiative to
succeed, city officials and neighbor-
hood leaders would have to listen to
one another and encourage respect
for diverse ideas — a philosophical
shift for two groups that were moreaccustomed to telling each other
what to do. ■
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THE HAMPTON NEIGHBORHOOD INITIATIVE, 1993-2003 •13
hetoric, as citizens know, onlygoes so far. The emerging
philosophy of the initiative had all the
right words, but the real test would be
in the actions. After working with the
pilot neighborhoods, articulating
lessons, and beginning to reorganize
internally, city officials realized they
had raised expectations and needed to
deliver a comprehensive approach.
They also had a strong sense of what
was needed, given their analysis, the
early lessons, and, most importantly,
from listening to citizens.
The underlying framework wasstraightforward – share leadership of
the initiative with neighborhood
leaders and institutional stakeholders,
build individual and organizational
capacity in neighborhoods and city
government, catalyze numerous small
neighborhood improvements, and
develop citizen-driven neighborhood
plans to define visions and goals and
significant actions – ownership,
capacity, and actions based on plans.
Undergirding this framework was
a core belief that Joan Kennedy
frequently asserts. Especially today, a
community has only so much energy
to work on community improvement,
she said. People in a community often
spend their time fighting or
backbiting or working on unrelated
projects that do not support each
other. Synergy is found, she suggests,
when a community has people
working together on efforts and
strategies that support each other.
This commonsense approach can be
found throughout Hampton’s efforts.■
BUILDING
THE INITIATIVE
BEYOND
THE PRINCIPLES
R
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14 • LEARNING FROM NEIGHBORHOODS
n the earliest years, the
Neighborhood Initiative was a
staff-driven enterprise. Staff listened,
staff consulted, staff engaged, but
ultimately staff decided. Yet the
program’s philosophy articulated a
goal of partnership. That goal was
easier to implement on the neighbor-
hood level using existing structures,
by creating ad hoc processes thatbrought together potential partners.
At the citywide level, a forum for
regular conversation and deliberation
among partners did not exist.
The architects of the initiative
decided it was essential to build a
citywide body that brought together
neighborhood leaders and other
stakeholders to guide the neighbor-
hood initiative. In
Hampton, those bodies are
called commissions and
thus, the Neighborhood
Commission was born.The Neighborhood
Commission provides
leadership, policy guidance
and support to the
Neighborhood Initiative.
While it is now seen as
critical to the initiative, it
was not always that way. As
the commission began to
do its work, questions arose
about its role, how it related to other
organizations, and whether it was
organized properly. Commissioners
did not understand what they were
supposed to do and spent a lot of time
setting policy and approving
Neighborhood Development Fund
projects. They also had trouble under-
standing how their work related to
the ongoing work of two other
groups, the Neighborhood Task Force
and the Neighborhood College
Alumni Association, the first made upof city officials, the second of
residents. With so much on their
plate, the commission was not
completely effective, and after a time,
they decided to reinvent themselves.
During the reinvention process,
they wrestled with core questions.
Did they effectively function like a
board of directors for a nonprofit
organization, setting policy direction
for staff, or were they more like a
board advising City Council, doling
out neighborhood development
grants? Did they need to be represen-
tative of every neighborhood, or only
of neighborhood perspectives? Some
of the commission’s most difficult
meetings occurred during this time.
The conversation led to the delin-
eation of 10 neighborhood districts,
covering every part of the city.
Representatives were to be elected
from each district through a neigh-borhood-based process. These are the
first ten members of the commission.
Three representatives of the city —
currently an assistant city manager,
the director of public works, and the
public communications officer —
join them. In addition, three institu-
tional representatives are on the
commission, representing business,
nonprofits and the faith community.
As a part of the city’s commitment to
involving youth directly in decision-
SHARING LEADERSHIP:
THE NEIGHBORHOOD
COMMISSION
I
…it was essential
to build
a citywide body
that brought together
neighborhood leaders
and other
stakeholders…
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THE HAMPTON NEIGHBORHOOD INITIATIVE, 1993-2003 •15
making, two youth representatives
also serve. Three representatives fromthe schools round out the 21-
member body.
Today the commission functions
like a non-profit board of directors,
providing policy guidance to the
initiative, establishing the direction
and making decisions. Meeting
monthly, members typically organize
around the goals and objectives set
out in the city’s strategic plan. Most
of their work takes place in
committee, where they gather,
sometimes once a week, to examine
issues related to youth, capacitybuilding and marketing the program,
among other issue areas identified in
the strategic plan.
Like the initiative itself, the
commission struggles with questions
of outreach and involvement. As
Andy Bigelow, who serves on the
commission, says, “The commission
still struggles to get citizens and
organizations involved in the initia-
tive. We are still stymied, we have not
been able to break through to get folks
interested in doing things in neigh-
borhoods. It’s almost like we’re
relegated to deal with the few folks
who want to engage us. But this ebbs
and flows. Our relationship with one
organization will get better, then the
people involved will disappear and
we’ll start over again. We’re still strug-
gling to find a way to work with that
problem, but I think we’re makinginroads and are being more accepted
for what we are.”
While the commission has been
challenged with connecting with
citizens who are not on the commis-
sion, it has played an essential role
in building partnerships among
commissioners, as well as creating
stronger connections with the
schools, city government and non-
profits agencies at a citywide level,
around work in specific neighbor-
hoods, a task that was very difficult
prior to its creation. ■
NEIGHBORHOOD
COMMISSION
DISTRICT REPRESENTATIVES . . . . . 10
CITY REPRESENTATIVES. . . . . . . . . 3
INSTITUTIONAL
REPRESENTATIVES . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
SCHOOL REPRESENTATIVES . . . . . . 3
YOUTH REPRESENTATIVES . . . . . . . 2
TOTAL NEIGHBORHOOD
COMMISSION MEMBERS . . 21
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16 • LEARNING FROM NEIGHBORHOODS
he initiative’s first challenge was
to embrace neighborhoods as
partners. “But when we first started
out, we had no idea of how to do it,”
Joan Kennedy explained. “Nobody
knew anybody else, and some
residents viewed city employees as
heartless bureaucrats instead of the
‘average human beings’ that most of us
are … We also needed to unravel thelayers of mistrust toward city govern-
ment that had built up over the years.”
This lesson was brought home to
Kennedy during a conversation she
had with a citizen while still serving
as planning director. It happened
while she was staffing a consensus
building committee working on an
east-west parkway. During the heat of
the controversy, a man who was
serving on the committee saw her at
his church, which, coincidentally, was
the same church she attended. So
surprised was he to see her in a placeof worship that he told her, “I didn’t
know you went to church!” He
expressed even greater shock upon
discovering that she had children.
Apparently, some citizens did not
believe city workers had regular lives
outside the office.
Many more residents would need
to have this kind of epiphany if the
initiative were to succeed to evoke the
sea change in thinking that the city
was seeking. But how could the city
create an environment where this
would happen?
As the importance of this question
began to sharpen in their minds, staff
members from the Neighborhood
Office were making another
discovery. They found that many
citizens understood the concept of
partnership, but few really under-
stood how the city was applying theidea in the initiative. Despite early
outreach efforts, many citizens
continued to view city government as
the provider of services and neighbor-
hoods as the recipients.
Changing this mindset would
require that the relationship between
neighborhoods and city government
change as well. In an attempt to do
this, Kennedy and others created
Neighborhood College, an intense,
multi-session program taught by city
officials as a kind of City Government
101, a school for neighborhood
leaders.
The program was built on the
assumption that citizens distrusted
government at least in part because
they did not understand what citygovernment did. Neighborhood
College would try to bridge this gap
by giving neighborhood leaders an
insider’s view of the city. At its core,
the program was an opportunity for
city staff and neighborhood leaders to
build relationships with one another
across organizational lines in a non-
contentious setting.
In one session, dubbed Budget
101, participants learned about city
revenues – where the money came
from, where it was spent, how little
discretionary income the city reallyhad, and why expanding the commer-
cial tax base improved the city’s finan-
cial health. Another session focused
on economic strategies. A third
examined land use. A fourth looked at
the connections between youth,
neighborhoods and schools. Mixed in
were tours of City Hall and neighbor-
hoods.
“Through Neighborhood College,
you get a better understanding on
what it takes to run a city and you get
BUILDING
NEIGHBORHOOD
CAPACITY:
SEND ‘EM
TO COLLEGE
T
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to know (city) staff people,” said
Andy Bigelow. “You get some idea
about what (city officials) really want
to do, and what they’re trying to do.”
Sitting side by side at the weekly
sessions, residents and city officials
began to forge personal relationships
with one another. No longer were the
city manager, planning director and
other city officials viewed as peoplewho just attended public meetings
every Tuesday night.
As time went on, this helped some
of the barriers that separated the
public and the government to disap-
pear. “The citizens got to know us as
people, and we found that there’s a lot
of mileage in that,” Kennedy said.
Inside city government, the experi-
ence of Neighborhood College led
some officials to realize that they had
no idea what was going on in some
neighborhoods. Talking directly with
residents helped to open lines of communication that did not exist
before. These conversations helped
officials look at neighborhoods
through the citizens’ own eyes.
One Parks Department employee
who attended Neighborhood College
remarked that after completing the
course she began to see neighbor-
hoods as more than the trees and
grass for which she was responsible.
She could see them in terms of what
the people who lived there wanted
them to be. Other staff members had
similar experiences.
Fifteen neighborhood leaders and
five city employees attended the first
class in the spring of 1995.
Recognizing the value of the connec-
tions the program yielded, the city
soon established a Neighborhood
College Alumni Association to
provide a medium for graduates tospread the word about the benefits of
the college.
The strategy worked. The
second Neighborhood College
attracted 25 people and
cemented a program that would
serve as one of the initiative’s
building blocks. More than 323
graduates (as of early 2003) and the
alumni association now actively
contribute to community affairs.
The Aberdeen Gardens neighbor-
hood, in particular, has made
attending Neighborhood College apriority. “Most of my (committee)
chairs are graduates,” said Roosevelt
Wilson, president of the Aberdeen
Gardens Historic and Civic
Association. “I think it’s a wonderful
program.”
It may be old-fashioned civic pride,
but it works. Stephanie Taylor,
another graduate, described what she
gained: “I now know how to imple-
ment positive change in my neighbor-
hood and where to go to access
resources through the city. I have a
new pride in the city by virtue of knowing what’s been done, and what
is being done to make Hampton a
better place to live.”
Neighborhood College has
provided the city a medium to
provide better and more complete
information to residents, as well as
access to city leaders. These factors,
over time, have helped to improve
the public perception of city govern-
ment and bolster the credibility of
the initiative. ■
THE HAMPTON NEIGHBORHOOD INITIATIVE, 1993-2003 •17
Neighborhood College
has provided the citya medium to provide
better and more complete
information to residents,
as well as access
to city leaders.
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18 • LEARNING FROM NEIGHBORHOODS
uilding trust goes beyond
building relationships, however.
By acting as a partner with neigh-
borhoods, the Neighborhood Office
had raised the bar for all city depart-
ments by raising the public’s expec-
tations. Although this was a giant
step forward, Neighborhood Office
staff feared the growing goodwill
would only continue if neighbor-hoods had positive interactions with
all city departments. This was
especially important because in
most cases these other departments
(and not the Neighborhood Office)
possessed the resources that neigh-
borhoods most wanted.
It was one thing for the city to say
that Hampton had changed the way it
worked with neighborhoods, but
what if residents approached a city
department to act collaboratively only
to be rebuffed? Even one bad experi-
ence could undo some of themomentum the initiative had created.
For the initiative to be successful, all
city departments would need to
change the way they did business and
devise a way to provide their services
on a neighborhood basis.
In the past, citizens who had sought
city services were not always greeted
warmly. After all, some bureaucrats
had reasoned, wasn’t it the job of city
government to meet the broad policy
goals set by elected officials and not
become mired in the single-issue
politics of local complainers?
“Neighborhood organizations
and leaders tended to be viewed as a
nuisance, always telling the city
what to do and diverting us from
doing what we thought was best,”
Joan Kennedy said.
“Our first message was internal to
city government, namely, that weneeded to view neighborhoods as a
strategic issue and neighborhood
leaders as resources and partners
instead of complaining adversaries,”
Kennedy said, and to do this, align-
ment from the top was needed.
One of the initiative’s primary
internal issues was allocating city
resources. To change how the city did
business – to provide what the initia-
tive leaders were calling ‘neighbor-
hood-based service delivery,’ or
allocating resources on a neighbor-
hood basis – better communicationamong city departments was required
and a new approach to allocating
resources between city departments
and the neighborhoods themselves
was needed.
To address these issues, city
manager Bob O’Neill assigned the
heads of the departments with the
resources most in demand by neigh-
borhoods to a Neighborhood Task
Force. After studying the issue, the
task force concluded that the city’s
relationship with neighborhoods was
hampered by systems that worked
well for city government but not as
well for neighborhoods. If Hampton
really were serious about changing its
relationship with neighborhoods,
these systems would have to change.
The means to better neighborhood
service delivery took the form of area
improvement teams. The first, estab-lished in Aberdeen Gardens, was
comprised of officials from several
city departments who worked with
neighborhood groups on specific
projects to improve the neighbor-
hood’s quality of life.
The team was directed to think less
about the departments they worked
in and more about what had to be
done to improve neighborhoods. The
idea also was to provide opportunities
for the neighborhood to help itself.
The area team concept worked
well in Aberdeen, a cohesive African-
American neighborhood in central
FOCUSING
CITY GOVERNMENT
ON
NEIGHBORHOODS
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Hampton where some homes had
been in the same families since the
1930s. This neighborhood had
resources the area team could draw
upon: residents hosted meetings of
the area team in their homes, and
several contractors who had the
ability to complete public improve-
ments lived in the neighborhood.
However, when the task force
tried to form a team in each of
Hampton’s 10 newly created neigh-
borhood districts (defined byanother Neighborhood Office
project), the concept was not as
successful. By applying the same idea
throughout the city, the initiative
went against the reinventing govern-
ment principle of ‘one size does not
fit all,’ and the approach did not
work well. Moreover, as Kennedy
said, “we had the capacity to be
extremely responsive to one area, but
not to the whole city at one time.”
The resources that existed in
Aberdeen did not exist to the same
degree in other neighborhoods.
After a few years of stops and
starts, the city decided to establish
area teams only after a neighborhood
completed a plan or was seeking
services best served by that model; in
effect, the area teams morphed into
implementation teams that would
help to carry out the plan.
Today, area teams are tailored to the
issues that a community is trying to
address; instead of a standardmembership, teams are made up of
city staff who control the resources
the projects require.
The notion of the Neighborhood
Task Force and the area teams bridged
some of the competing concepts
within the reinventing government
movement. Initially focused on the
idea of “citizen as customer,” propo-
nents of reinvention had urged local
governments to create seamless, one-
stop connections to their customers.
If Hampton’s area teams had only
organized themselves to deliver
services better, they would have
violated the “partnership” principle of
the neighborhood initiative (itself a
manifestation of the reinventing
government movement), because
they would have been acting
independently of the neighborhoods.
By working with citizens collec-tively and fashioning a service
delivery strategy that is driven by the
community, the city is effectively
collaborating with the community to
achieve shared goals – a dramatic
change from separate agencies with
separate plans working on different
timelines that was in place before the
initiative began.
Once the program was off the
ground, the issue of internal ‘align-
ment’ became a central challenge.
Although the efforts made by the
Neighborhood Task Force were “thespark that created a new way of
working in the city government,”
according to assistant city manager
Mike Monteith, the challenge
remains. Some departments have
bought into the community
involvement process and have
devised creative ways to involve the
public in decision making, while
others are not as comfortable with
the approach, he said.
“Today, we still have departments
that don’t understand community
participation,” Monteith said. “And
we still hear from sectors of the
community who complain that the
old way of doing business is still alive,
but we are getting there.”
To accomplish the initiative’s
broader goals, the city and its neigh-
borhoods would have to learn how to
work together. This would be a two-fold learning process. At the begin-
ning, the city could not collaborate
with neighborhoods because it did
not know what the neighborhoods’
priorities were. However, even if all
sides were willing, nobody knew
exactly how to proceed. To be
successful, the initiative would have
to address both aspects.
“In true collaboration, the city
brings what it knows to the table and
the neighborhood brings what it
knows, and we make something
better than what either could doalone,” Kennedy said. ■
THE HAMPTON NEIGHBORHOOD INITIATIVE, 1993-2003 •19
ABERDEEN MUSEUM • BEFORE ABERDEEN MUSEUM • AFTER
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20 • LEARNING FROM NEIGHBORHOODS
he internal capacity issues that
the Neighborhood Task Force
was grappling with had an external
analog: neighborhood capacity, or the
ability of neighborhoods to muster
the resources needed to carry out
their goals.
In the early days of the initiative,
Neighborhood Office staff struggled
to define capacity and what it lookedlike. Soon it became clear, however,
that capacity, in whatever form it was
taking, was weak across the city, a
finding that became a driving force
behind the city’s decision to launch
programs such as Neighborhood
College.
Building capacity has been perhaps
the most important function of the
initiative because of the key role that
neighborhoods play in it. If neighbor-
hoods cannot come together to set
priorities, gather resources and imple-
ment their goals, the initiative as awhole cannot succeed.
In many neighborhoods, capacity
has proven to be the dividing line
between success and failure.
Successful neighborhoods “are the
ones that care the most and have
placed their own projects as number
one on their agenda,” Joan Kennedy
said. Neighborhoods where leaders
have assumed responsibility for
seeing projects through and who have
made neighborhood work almost a
full-time job generally have achieved
their goals, while less successful
neighborhoods have lacked one or
more of these elements.
When the initiative began, the
Neighborhood Office often found
itself serving as a link to potential
neighborhood partners. This task has
evolved over time as the office has
established itself and staff has imple-mented tools and programs. Today,
the office’s neighborhood facilitators
serve more as coaches and consult-
ants to neighborhood organizations
and less as links between the commu-
nity and city government.
The neighborhoods that have
come forward to participate generally
have done so under two different
guises. “A neighborhood organization
may come in and not be effective,
because they’ve had the same person
in charge for a number of years, and
no one is coming out to meetings,”Kennedy said. “Or, we may have five
people come through the door who
want to organize, but they don’t know
what to do.” The more complex the
issue, the more complex the capacity
issues usually are.
This is where the facilitators come
in. Their work can be as basic as facil-
itating a meeting or helping neighbor-
hood leaders inform residents about
meeting times.
Although this investment of staff
time helps to create effective neigh-
borhood leaders and, by extension,
effective neighborhood groups, the
individualized nature of the work
means that facilitators must help to
develop new leadership whenever
someone leaves his or her post, a
phenomenon that happens frequently
in some neighborhoods.
“If you invest too much in a singleperson, and that person for whatever
reason ceases to be an effective leader,
you are nowhere, you’re back to
square one,” Kennedy said.
As a result, in recent years, a key
function of the Neighborhood Office
has been to develop organizational
capacity that is not tied to individuals.
Neighborhood College has been
Hampton’s primary tool to achieve
this, and over time, the program has
evolved to meet the needs of the city
and the program’s participants.
The original design requiredparticipants to meet twice a week for
12 weeks, a commitment that proved
to be too time- and resource- inten-
sive for everyone involved. So the city
divided the course into two parts. The
first teaches residents how to be more
effective citizens, while the second
gathers neighborhood leaders in a
classroom, provides them with skill-
building exercises, then sends them
out to apply these skills in their
neighborhoods.
FOCUS FIRST ON
CAPACITY BUILDING,
THEN DO MORE
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By providing leaders with a forum
to work together, the city is encour-
aging them to create a peer network to
help support one another. To augment
these efforts, the city is developing a
third phase of Neighborhood College
that will focus on organizational
development, in a forum that resem-
bles the kind of training provided to a
public board or commission. Thesesessions will focus on building the
core competencies of neighborhood
organizations.
Although capacity-building efforts
are intended to help neighborhoods
accomplish their goals, the means of
building community can be an end in
itself. This is another important point.
“Working together for a common
cause often can make the biggest
difference in a neighborhood’s quality
of life,” Kennedy said.
Residents do not work together
unless they feel invested in theirneighborhoods. Indeed, one of the
hallmarks of the Neighborhoods
Initiative is the emotion with which
people both inside and outside city
government speak of it. In many
ways, the initiative has prompted in
residents new feelings about the city,
in addition to new attitudes (see story
on Buckroe Beach). ■
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22 • LEARNING FROM NEIGHBORHOODS
iven Joan Kennedy’s history as
planning director and the role of
planners in creating the program, the
initiative had a strong planning flavor
in its early years. As noted earlier, the
initial idea of the initiative was to
divide the city into neighborhoods,
pick three neighborhoods each year,
complete plans for these areas, and
then move on to the next set of neigh-borhoods until every neighborhood in
Hampton had a plan.
But as neighborhoods became
involved in the initiative (partici-
pating as pilots and with neighbor-
hood leaders serving on the steering
committee), the process broke down.
The design then was changed so that
every neighborhood that stepped
forward could participate, and many
of these neighborhoods, when given
the opportunity, came into the
process on their own terms and with
their own ideas about what theywanted to do.
This experience caused the city
to evaluate the program design, at
which time internal issues such as
the problem of how to allocate city
resources became apparent. As the
city worked on these internal issues,
several external issues came into
focus, including the need to
improve neighborhood capacity,
which led, in turn, to programs
such as Neighborhood College. The
first 10 years of the initiative can beviewed, then, as a push and pull of
internal and external issues,
coupled with the city’s responses to
these issues in the form of programs
and other interventions.
The history and evolution of the
initiative can be viewed another way
as well. In broad terms, the initiative
has performed four functions:
allocating resources, building neigh-
borhood capacity, reaching out to the
public and organizing itself.
The programs that fall under eachof these functions can be thought of
as building blocks that, together, make
up the initiative. In this way,
Neighborhood College can be
thought of as one of the primary
building blocks for building neigh-
borhood capacity, while organiza-
tional initiatives such as the
Neighborhood Task Force can be seen
as a building block or foundation for
allocating city resources. ■
INTERNAL AND
EXTERNAL
PUSH AND PULL:
AN ENDURING
THEME
G
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uccess, it turns out, sometimes
hinges on small improvements.
Although some neighborhoods joined
the initiative to develop large projects
such as community centers, other
smaller and less visible improvements
often are just as important to a neigh-
borhood’s vitality. Ironically, because
of their size and the way city govern-
ment was structured, some of thesesmall improvements were among the
most difficult to carry out.
A number of neighborhoods, for
example, wanted more streetlights to
improve safety and reduce crime.
These projects qualified for the city’s
list of proposed public works projects,
but to build a small-ticket item like a
streetlight or two was not easy. The
city prioritized the project list to
maximize its limited resources, but
because the city had no way to pay for
small-ticket items unless money was
taken from larger ones, small projectswere seldom completed. Given the
city’s financial situation, this was not
going to change unless a new source
of funds was created.
In 1995, the Neighborhood Task
Force recommended that the city
establish a Neighborhood Improve-
ment Fund to support neighborhood-
level public improvements. Eventually
the fund was divided into two separate
programs: matching grants for small,
self-help projects and the larger
Neighborhood Improvement Fund for
projects that involved physical
improvements to public property.
Nearly 100 neighborhood-based
projects have received support
through these funds since their
inception.
Matching grants are available for
short-term, collaborative projects that
are consistent with the initiative’sgoals. Projects may be social in nature
or involve physical improvements to
public or private property. However,
they must be designed to increase
neighborhood capacity or reinforce a
sense of community.
Although the city does not limit
the scope of projects eligible for
matching grants, the grants
themselves are limited to $5,000. To
receive one, a neighborhood organiza-
tion must collaborate with other
groups and/or city agencies. They also
must provide matching resources(through fundraising or sweat equity)
for each dollar the city invests. In
addition to labor and cash, the city
also accepts land donations and
donations of materials and services as
part of the match.
Programs like the Neighborhood
Development Fund point to the value
and effectiveness of the
Neighborhood Task Force. City
manager Bob O’Neill established the
task force after it became apparent
that the initiative could not move
forward until city government
operated in a manner that allowed it
to serve neighborhoods – the internal
alignment issue discussed earlier.
This experience had taught city
officials a lesson. “If you have a
department with a strategic focus and
no control over resources,” like the
Neighborhood Office, “you are set upfor failure,” Joan Kennedy said.
In effect, the Neighborhood Task
Force was an internal capacity-
building tool. The task force devel-
oped a strategic plan and came up
with the idea of a Neighborhood
Commission made up of neighbor-
hood leaders who would
govern the initiative. The
task force also involved itself
in the day-to-day issues, for
example, in the way the city
was addressing neighbor-
hood blight.“Nobody in the city was
looking at neighborhood
issues proactively, so that
became the task force’s role,”
Kennedy said. Over the
years, the task force would
examine issues such as
public safety and develop other ideas
that city departments work together
to implement. ■
THE HAMPTON NEIGHBORHOOD INITIATIVE, 1993-2003 •23
S
SMALL
IMPROVEMENTS
MAKE A BIG
DIFFERENCE
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24 • LEARNING FROM NEIGHBORHOODS
ay “Greater Wythe Area Plan” in
Hampton and staff roll their eyes
or sigh. And that’s before you ask the
citizens what they think. Planning
director Terry O’Neill recalls one
resident of the Greater Wythe neigh-
borhood in southwestern Hampton
who grew exasperated after many
meetings, frustrated at a process that
seemed to go on and on. Finally, heannounced to the group, “When I
first got into this, all I wanted was a
neighborhood watch.”
The Wythe plan was one of the
first plans undertaken by
Neighborhood Office, and, after eight
months of start-up time, the several-
month planning process (that in some
ways continues to the present day
and) that ensued eventually resulted
in a new neighborhood plan.
Since embarking on the Wythe
plan, the city’s approach to neigh-
borhood planning has evolved, andit helps to understand what leaders
were trying to change.
In the years before the initiative,
the Department of Planning worked
with neighborhoods to develop small
area plans, most of which focused on
land use. Deciding that this approach
was too limited, especially in neigh-
borhoods where land use was just
one of many pertinent issues, city
officials decided that neighborhood
plans drafted under the initiative
ideally would address physical,
social and civic issues.
This more holistic conceptualiza-
tion of the plan created challenges on
both sides of the table. On the city
side, many different departments
needed to be present if the plan were
to address a broad array of issues. Yet
many of these departments were not
used to planning with neighbor-
hoods, nor did they believe they hadsufficient staff capacity to be
involved at all of the meetings.
Neighborhoods, on the other hand,
were used to physical planning, and
the first issues they usually put on
the table focused on “curb and
gutter” problems, no matter what
was really happening in the neigh-
borhood. Both sides had to figure out
how to work comprehensively.
There also was an internal
coordination issue. Although the
Neighborhood Office operates
separately from the Department of
Planning, it participates in the
drafting of neighborhood plans, with
Neighborhood Office staff often
serving as plan facilitators. Despite
this organizational distance, the
neighborhood planning process
plays a key role in the initiative, for it
is through plans that neighborhoodsset priorities (which serve as the
basis for the city’s funding decisions
and provide direction to the neigh-
borhoods that create them).
Hampton has created several
templates it follows to complete
neighborhood plans. When a neigh-
borhood enters the process
mistrusting city government,
however, planners set aside these
templates and engage the neighbor-
hood’s stakeholders in designing the
process. This is an important
innovation because the partnershiprequired during the implementation
process requires that neighborhoods
be invested in their plans, and
having neighborhoods buy into the
process at the outset helps to ensure
this outcome.
Hampton, like many communities,
also struggles with representation and
communication within its planning
process. Are the stakeholders at the
table representative and do they
communicate with the broader
NEIGHBORHOOD
PLANNING:
HELPING
NEIGHBORHOODS
SHAPE THEIR FUTURE
S
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community? City planners have
encouraged stakeholders to act as
information conduits to their neigh-
bors. This process has worked well in
some neighborhoods, but not in
others, as planners have discovered
that some stakeholders are not adept
at, or even interested in, involving
others from their neighborhoods.
“Many people have clamored formore (public) involvement,” Joan
Kennedy said, “but once they
themselves were involved they didn’t
see the need to involve anyone else.”
Through this experience, staff has
learned that, in the absence of effective
communication networks in neigh-
borhoods, stakeholders have a difficult
time representing their areas. This
challenge is now managed explicitly as
a part of the process design for a
neighborhood plan.
The planning process has suffered
in some neighborhoods from a non-representative mix of stakeholders.
The mix matters because the people at
the table determine the direction and
outcome of the plan. In the Newtown
neighborhood, for example, the
process began with several adult stake-
holders who told the city officials at
the table that the neighborhood did
not have many youth. Upon looking at
the data, however, the group found
that Newtown had a higher concentra-
tion of young people than the average
neighborhood in Hampton. Later,
when youth were brought into the
process, they became a major part of
the plan. Similar types of disconnects
have surfaced among stakeholders in
other neighborhoods.
As the city has worked with more
and more neighborhoods, it has
become apparent that a plan is not the
most appropriate intervention inneighborhoods that have more
immediate needs. Further, the city
does not have the staff and resources
to complete full-blown plans in every
neighborhood.
To help the Neighborhood Office
decide when a plan was appropriate,
the Neighborhood Task Force devel-
oped a “decision tree” that helps to
determine whether neighborhood
requests would be served best
through existing resources, a plan, or
other types of interventions.
Although this tool has been effective,it was never in common use, although
staff from the Neighborhood Office
apply its concepts when deciding how
best to work with neighborhoods.
Expectations also pose a challenge.
Sometimes, as the planning process
moves toward implementation, there
is confusion on what the roles of the
neighborhood and the city will be. To
clarify these roles, the city has found it
helpful to develop a memorandum of
understanding that specifies who will
contribute what during the planning
process. This memo also addresses
logistical issues and other ground
rules. Officers from the neighborhood
organizations and city staff sign these
agreements, which have helped to
clear up confusion and provide a
roadmap for implementation.
Despite all of these challenges, the
neighborhood planning process inHampton generally has been
successful. Because the City Council
has been willing to fund major
projects identified in neighborhood
plans, neighborhoods know their
hard work will be rewarded and,
consequently, they believe in the
process.
“Every process is different,”
Kennedy said. “One of the lessons we
learned over time is that a neighbor-
hood plan is a good opportunity for
people to learn about the neighbor-
hood, and what we think of as charac-
teristics of a neighborhood often are
not borne out by the data. So we as
staff look at neighborhoods through
different eyes as well.”
Work on neighborhood plans led
to other lessons as well:
■ Neighborhoods want problems with
city services solved before they are willing to take the concept of a
partnership seriously.
■ Although the details changed, the
Healthy Neighborhoods design was
on target if everybody abided by the
guiding principles.
■ Every time a new stakeholder came
to the table, the recommendations
for neighborhood plans had to be
revised before the new person would
accept them. ■
THE HAMPTON NEIGHBORHOOD INITIATIVE, 1993-2003 •25
…neighborhoods
know their hard work
will be rewarded and,
consequently, they
believe in the process.
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26 • LEARNING FROM NEIGHBORHOODS
lthough the initiative tappedinto the latent demand of many
neighborhoods to work with the city
to achieve a goal (whether they
envisioned themselves as partners
with the city or not), the process of
involving neighborhoods has not
been an easy one. Although many
neighborhood leaders literally “lined
up at the door” when the
Neighborhood Office opened, not
every neighborhood was represented.
Others had to be invited to partici-
pate, and the initiative had to reachout to the community to bring them
in. Even neighborhoods that have
been involved since the initiative
began have varied in their level of
involvement over the years. Thus,
community outreach has been an
ongoing process.
Spurred by the program’s early
successes, the Neighborhood
Commission decided in 1997 to raise
the initiative’s profile through a
celebration of neighborhoods it called
REACHING OUT
TO THE
COMMUNITY:
NEIGHBORHOOD
MONTH
A
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Neighborhood Week. Enthusiasmabout the idea swelled, and dozens of
volunteers stepped forward to create a
program that exceeded the expecta-
tions of many. However, it was
tremendously difficult to make all of
the activities happen within one
week. The basic concept of
Neighborhood Week was a good one,
however, and the event was later
expanded into Neighborhood Month.
Neighborhood Month is a month
long celebration of unity and neigh-
borhood pride hosted by theHampton Neighborhood Commission.
Neighborhoods, as the brochure
states, “are a cause for celebration
because not only are they the ‘Heart
of Hampton’ but where we live,
work, and play.” Events include
open houses, neighborhood yard
sales, community picnics, multicul-
tural festivals, community cleanups,
marathons, and even a trip to
the national Neighborhoods USA
conference. ■
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28 • LEARNING FROM NEIGHBORHOODS
s the Neighborhoods Initiative
enters its second decade, the
first 10 years of experience has
yielded many lessons about collabo-
rating with neighborhoods, both
positive and negative.
On the plus side:
■ Decisions on allocating city resources
are better.
■ Neighborhoods that participate in
the process make sure that projects
are implemented and take responsi-
bility for that implementation.
■ Neighborhood plans are more
comprehensive and relate better to
what people in neighborhoods
really care about.
■ Neighborhood plans have a better
chance of being implemented.
However:
■ The process is messy.
■ The city loses some control over the
process.
■ The process is resource intensive.
■ The process takes more time than
a process without as much public
participation.
“These community involvement
processes, especially in neighbor-
hoods, are not just a method to seek
public involvement; they actually
become part of the process of
building and sustaining a sense of
community in neighborhoods,” said
Joan Kennedy. “People get to know
and understand their neighbors; they
learn and come to care about theirneighborhood; they start to work on
things together; they become a
community instead of just people
who happen to live in the same area
of the city.”
Communities that want to emulate
Hampton’s model still must
customize its elements to their situa-
tion, said former city manager Bob
O’Neill, who has studied the issue
nationally and who applied the
principles of reinventing government
to Fairfax County, Virginia after
leaving Hampton in 1997.“Conceptually, this approach is
broad enough to apply, but there is no
set of universal techniques that work
in a cookie-cutter fashion,” he said.
“What a neighborhood strategy looks
like has a lot to do with a city’s neigh-
borhoods, culture and the level of
trust in neighborhoods among polit-
ical leaders.
“People want to make the places
where they live better,” O’Neill said.
“When you give them an opportunity
to make a contribution, they are
willing to do it.”
Terry O’Neill, the city’s planning
director, said the relationships built
by the initiative have allowed city
officials to “know what’s between
the words” written in neighborhood
plans.
“The initiative has done a great
deal to improve relations with the
community,” O’Neill said. “We truly
believe we are making far better
decisions because we have a much
better sense of the community.”
A DECADE OF
LESSONS LEARNED
A
“People want to
make the places
where they live
better… give them
an opportunity to
make a contribution,
they are willing
to do it.”
— BOB O’NEILL FORMER CITY MANAGER
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Terry O’Neill said Hampton was
fortunate to have, from the outset,
many community leaders who under-
stood and valued collaboration.
“Without those individuals partici-pating, I’m not sure we could have
sustained” the initiative, he said.
The program, in turn, has helped
to spawn a network that allows
officials to know whom to call when
issues arise. And before they make a
call, a relationship has already been
forged, trust exists and both sides
understand they can give their honest
opinions, discuss their viewpoints
quickly and reach an understanding,
Terry O’Neill said.
“It really is of immense value,” he
said.
Terry O’Neill credits the leadership
of Mayor James Eason, who
supported the program when it was just a concept, and Bob O’Neill, who
as city manager was willing to take
chances to make it work. They helped
to instill within city government the
willingness to look at problems
creatively and were able to foster
among city employees a trust that
they could find answers to the issues
at hand.
These efforts have embedded in
Hampton the spirit of collaboration as
a fundamental value. “It is so
immersed, there’s no way to stop it,”
Terry O’Neill said.
Neighborhoods now expect high
level of interaction from city govern-
ment and are willing to demand it if it
does not happen.
As the city and its neighborhoods
look toward the future, Kennedy and
others see the initiative growing
broader , by having every area of thecity represented by an active and
effective neighborhood-serving
organization, and deeper , by getting
all neighborhoods to have defined
objectives as well as plans to make
measurable progress in meeting them.
Regardless how it proceeds, the
initiative is in Hampton to stay.
Assistant city manager Mike
Monteith believes the initiative would
continue to function even if he, Joan
Kennedy and other key leaders were
to leave the city.
“It may change form and mighteven take a step backwards, but I
think (if the city were to take another
approach), there would be enough
uncomfortableness with the way the
city did business that the City Council
would eventually wonder why they
were working a lot harder than they
used to, and something would come
forward to fill that gap,” Monteith
said. “The community would demand
to be involved.” ■
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Y.H. THOMAS:
THE MAGICAL POINT OF INTERVENTION
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Y.H. THOMAS • A-1
o understand the sense of
ownership and pride that the
volunteers at the Y.H. Thomas
Community Center have
for their facility, consider
ERNIE FERGUSON. Every
weekday for almost seven
years, Ferguson, 68, who is
retired, has served as facili-
ties manager, workingmorning, noon and night,
without receiving so much
as a penny for his time.
His fellow volunteers
refer to him as “Mr. Ferguson,” and,
although they log many hours
themselv