Laura Glesby Photo
Delphine Clyburn at Sunday’s announcement.
Delphine Clyburn celebrated a recent groundswell of community and political engagement in Newhallville on Sunday as she kicked off her campaign for reelection as Ward 20 alder.
Clyburn and her supporters enjoyed food, music, and volleyball outside the Grace and Peace International Ministries Church on Starr Street, where her husband, Michael Clyburn, is bishop. She is running unopposed for a fifth two-year term representing the ward.
A volleyball net in the church’s backyard.
An alder since 2012, Clyburn works at a group home for people with physical and cognitive disabilities. She grew up in foster care, an experience that she said informed her perspective when she first became an alder.
“I was a foster child and I didn’t have a voice,” she said. “I looked at my ward in that way — we didn’t have a voice. We were all foster children.”
At the start of her tenure as alder, Clyburn said, she went door to door in her ward and recruited around 100 people to help her engage neighbors in activism and politics.
“Everybody started talking to one another and sharing with one another,” she said. More Newhallville residents started serving on city commissions and attending Board of Zoning hearings. Attendance at Newhallville’s Community Management Team increased, as management team chair Kim Harris confirmed.
“Their eyes are open. Their ears are open. They’re watching,” Clyburn said of her constituents.
Barbara Vereen calls for voter registration volunteers.
Ward Democratic Committee co-chair Barbara Vereen said that voter turnout in the ward has been steadily increasing. Each year Vereen sets a higher goal for turnout at the polls and runs a canvassing and phone-banking effort to encourage people to vote. This year she hopes that between 800 and 1,000 Ward 20 Newhallville residents will vote in the September primary.
When Vereen spoke at the event, she rallied the crowd to help her register voters in the ward. She and Clyburn have endorsed Mayor Toni Harp for re-election, and she noted that supporters could stop by her home as well as Harp’s campaign headquarters to pick up canvassing materials.
Harp praised Clyburn’s role in the transformation of the former “Mud Hole” at Shelton Avenue and Hazel Street — once a hub of the drug trade — into the “Learning Corridor,” an outdoor space where biking events, classes, and concerts have been held.
Other accomplishments Clyburn highlighted include events geared toward seniors, such as the collective birthday party at Newhall Gardens housing development, and the opening of Cherry Ann Park at the New Haven-Hamden border.
“People used it as a dumping site,” Vereen said of Cherry Ann Park. Now the park has a community garden and a playground, and Clyburn said she hopes to install a splash pad.
Clyburn takes regular walks throughout the neighborhood to note sidewalks in need of repair and trees in need of trimming. In 2017, she joined the Livable City Initiative (LCI) and a host of other city officials on such a walk for the first of the city’s anti-blight neighborhood sweeps.
Inside the church, Clyburn zooms in on a photo of a crack in the sidewalk she’d seen on one of her walks.
Clyburn said her priority for a fifth term would be to “continue to get services for this area.” In particular, she said, hopes to improve living conditions in housing authority complexes for seniors.
Carlotta Clark, a longtime community organizer in Brooklyn who recently moved to Newhallville, said she wholeheartedly supports Clyburn after meeting her at a “Stop the Violence” protest.
Neighbor Malicia Hopes said she had never met Clyburn before. She came to the event with her three kids because she wanted to know whom to call about her concerns. She said she noticed that the crime rate went down in Newhallville; she wants to see more programs for kids.
Clyburn gave both Clark and Hopes a shout-out when she spoke to the crowd, thanking both new and familiar faces.
Community Management Team Chair Kim Harris called Clyburn a “caring god-fairy spirit.”
Harris has championed the One City initiative, which brought all of the city’s disparate Community Management Teams to collaborate on projects.
Harris said that Clyburn was instrumental in making One City happen, connecting her with city officials and administrators at Lincoln-Bassett School who got on board with the project.
“She’s helped to bring back respect to Newhallville. … I just really hope that she hangs around for a long time.” Harris said. “I think people have their hope back.”
So what is Clyburn doing to stop the take over of Newhallville by the gentrification vampires?