New Haven Independent

A small but committed group of Dwight community members — and community adoptees like New Haven Action’s Berry Kennedy — gathered in Union Temple Baptist Church on Platt Street. Community doers like New Haven Action’s Berry Kennedy, Calder of the Youth Concerns Committee, and Bill Bixby of the Public Safety Committee weren’t satisfied letting concerns wait for the monthly meetings of the Dwight Community Management Team (DCMT).

So they fliered the neighborhood, hauled in sandwiches and brownies, and came prepared to report, solicit suggestions, and enlist volunteers for their campaigns addressing the need for lighting, youth opportunities, and neighborhood block-watches in Dwight.

DCMT chair Curlena McDonald (pictured), who called Tuesday’s a rare, welcome initiative to assemble as a community outside of set parameters (and inside her own church, where she is a deacon), provided enthusiastic introductions of the presenters to follow as “the kind of people who turn up in the neighborhood and just get to work.” The event included a thank-you apiece to Temple Union’s Pastor Mathis, and District 4’s Lt. Ray Hassett for “taking into account how we want our policing to happen.”

The first to offer a campaign update was Kennedy, who said the Dwight lighting initiative was an important project for New Haven Action, a “campaign-oriented” non-profit founded by Yale students to help strengthen New Haven’s neighborhoods. Linking dim streets to crime with international data (and Lt. Hassett’s affirmation, from the back of the room) as back-up, she guided the crowd through a hand-out outlining steps like tree-trimming and lamp-repair toward a safer, brighter Dwight — and encouraged all to take home one of the energy-efficient bulbs from the box she’d brought. “It’s not a revelation,” said Kennedy — though illuminate it will — “but it’s a small thing you can do to make your neighborhood safer.”

(Click here and here to read what experts at Rutgers and in Great Britain have to say on the subject.)

Next up was Gina Calder, to talk about her committee’s plans for positive opportunities for youth, like a March screening at the Dwight School of Youth Rights Media’s Book ’Em — and, thinking bigger, for an eventual community center right in the neighborhood. Calder said she’d felt strongly from the start that a youth agenda not be thought a part of public safety. “We need to show them we care about them without looking at them as troublemakers,” she said.

After some discussion of funding and possible inter-neighborhood partnerships in conjunction with the city’s new Youth Initiative, Florita Gillespie, DCMT co-chair and member of the Youth Concerns Committee, threw in her support for a center right in Dwight: “We’ve been shipping our kids out to other neighborhoods for too long. What they need is a home in their neighborhood,” she said.

To Calder’s call on churches to open their doors to pilot programs until a center be built, Pastor Mathis responded amenably — but also turned the tables back on younger leaders: “No offense to the older people who want to help out, but these kids are going to listen to people who know who 50 Cent is.”

Longtime Dwight resident Kate Walton suggested food as a cross-generational uniter. She spoke of an elsewhere-successful model of a “Teen Café,” where youth gather to eat healthful meals and learn about nutrition — implying that Dwight would have an advantage getting funding from the Connecticut Food Bank, where Walton is an employee.

Calder then gave the floor to Bill Bixby, whose focus was the establishment of neighborhood block-watches in Dwight. Saying all it takes is five people and a desire to get back to an old-neighborhood model of small communities policing themselves, he gave out brochures from the NHPD and — like a neighbor — his own home phone number.

Uncle Chuck’s Turn

Last on the docket was Charlie Dixon (pictured) — “Uncle Chuck,” as he said neighbors call him, and “the greenest thumb in New Haven,” according to Bixby.

Credited by McDonald earlier as the reason so many Dwight yards can now boast planters — “he just shows up at your house with them,” she said — Dixon made neighborhood organizing sound fun and natural, as he related his work to green and beautify Dwight through the organization Greenspace.

“If you want a tree planted, find me,” he said. “People recognize my red truck.”

After the meeting, recent Hillhouse graduate Jessie Phillips said that lights and block-watches were fine, but they’re “more reactive than proactive. If you can get to kids first, you might not need all that so much.” He said he thought a community center could work, but advocated something citywide, as a step against violent tension between neighborhoods. Among Phillips’ ideas is “a huge city-wide youth summit — or something. Something to see the city’s youth addressed like any other demographic.”

Gina Calder jumped in again in favor of an opportunity-providing, rather than a policing or troubleshooting, approach to future programming.

“Youth need a space of their own, not a bunch of people looking at them like they’re about to do wrong. They begin to internalize that, until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.” As for Walton’s vision for a Teen Café, Calder said she “loved the idea.” She saw it paired with an entrepreneurial training program, of the sort McDonald already runs, but with a catering focus. “Of course I haven’t surveyed any youth yet, so I can’t push it!” she added.

Lending lightbulb-distribution support and snapping pictures throughout the event, and still around when the Union Temple basement had nearly emptied out, was Whitney Haring-Smith, executive director of New Haven Action. Professing confidence in Kennedy and in Dwight, he assured that NHA’s presence at the event was just the tip of an iceberg of commitment to lighting up Dwight. Citing upcoming meetings with business owners about sponsoring floodlights, Haring-Smith said, “Conversations like this are just a part of a much longer process.”

“This is a good neighborhood, with a good history,” said Nixon, agreeing with Bixby that recent years had seen the area “come up.” With ratios of owner-occupied homes on the rise, this is “becoming one of the places that people want to be,” said Nixon. And this is the only place that has Curlena McDonald, with what Bixby called her “activist heart.”

In her years as a deacon, resident, and many-hatted leader in Dwight, McDonald said she has seen ebbs and flows in the organized effort to address community challenges. “You wake up one day, and you see the problems are still there. So you go back to work, get people on board. Tonight was a good start.”