Positive Partnership

By Greg Kline
©2007 The News-Gazette

Twenty years after the University of Illinois began the effort that became the East St. Louis Action Research Project, the Mississippi River city's population has fallen by 10,000. Of those left, almost all black, a third live in poverty. The unemployment rate is twice the state average. A riverfront casino hasn't provided the expected economic boost. The city and its environs do their most prominent business in strip joints.

Folks directing a visitor around town use the clubs, expansive and bold in their signage, as landmarks, at times out of necessity. Street signs, which have scrap-metal value, are often missing. Even in nicer neighborhoods of - formerly at least - stately homes and parks, steering around the potholes is like navigating a minefield.

A significant portion of the downtown is a ghost town. Residential neighborhoods are dotted with well-kept homes down the street from burned-out or boarded-up shells of houses, with thickly overgrown, trash-strewn vacant lots between.

Still, Billie Turner brooks no bad-mouthing of her hometown, even from relatives, she tells a busload of mostly white UI students about to be put to work in East St. Louis over an "outreach weekend."

The UI's lone representative in East St. Louis full time, Turner doesn't sugarcoat its problems. She mentions most of them during the bus tour to orient the students. She also highlights, however, signs of change.

The bus passes some pristine neighborhoods of new homes and attractive apartments designed to interest young professionals, a state-of-the-art commuter rail link with St. Louis across the river and a new commercial strip with a Schnucks, a Walgreens and a pizza place that actually delivers. President Clinton came for the opening of the Walgreens.

UI students and faculty like those on the bus - who will soon be replacing a roof at a community theater, painting and laying carpet at a shelter for battered women and clearing brush and trash from vacant lots - didn't build the housing developments, train station or mall.

But the UI program and its participants had a hand - and sometimes both hands and feet as well - in laying the groundwork for such developments.

"They bring a lot of brain power and creativity," East St. Louis Mayor Alvin Parks Jr. said. "They also bring a lot of energy."

What the East St. Louis Action Research Project appears to be about, ultimately, is helping build oases in a desert whose poverty, murder rate and political corruption have become the stuff of not entirely inaccurate legend, from which more of the landscape might gradually be reclaimed.

Along the way, the program has had a positive impact on the partners the UI works with - from neighborhood groups, churches, schools and others - and the people they represent.

Even larger might be its effect on the UI faculty and especially the UI students who participate.

Certainly, the program affected the life of Vickie Kimmel Forby. A Peoria native, she was bent on moving to San Diego before becoming involved in the East St. Louis effort while working on her degree in architecture.

She's now executive director of Emerson Park Development Corp., which has helped spur about $100 million in projects like the Parsons Place apartment complex. She also heads a charter school in the city that puts kids who have dropped out of high school or been expelled back on track.

"It made a huge impact on my life," Forby said of the action research project.

Former UI Professor Ken Reardon, now at Cornell, which he said has used the UI East St. Louis model in a number of programs, called the Emerson Park neighborhood developments on the northwest side "a staggering achievement," one internationally known in circles focused on revitalizing economically distressed communities, he said.

Reardon said the reaction would have been incredulous had you predicted that in the early 1990s - when he and colleagues took over and shifted the focus from grand, unlikely riverfront development schemes to the neighborhood, community group partnership model it retains today.

"I think that we would have assumed you had a serious mental health problem," he said. "It was just inconceivable."

Decisive early event

Asked for his most memorable moment, UI architecture Professor Mike Andrejasich, who came on about the same time as Reardon, recalled some residents approaching them about overgrown lots and an abandoned house that was the scene of drug transactions and an assault on a neighborhood girl.

We want this down, and we want this a park, the residents said.

"It really kind of caused myself and Ken Reardon and (former UI professor) Brian Orland to say: 'How do we take what we've been doing and put it into action?' Andrejasich said. "It was the beginning of the Illinois Avenue playground working with the concerned citizens of Precinct 19."

It was an early moment that characterized the way the UI program would proceed: let the residents decide the issues to be addressed; work with them as partners; provide expertise and bodies where necessary to get the job done; and build local capacity to carry on even without the university.

"The neighborhoods are always the experts," said architecture Professor Bob Selby, whose students have designed a new community center in the Precinct 12 area this fall. "They know what's needed. We don't have an agenda, they have the agenda."

Forby was the lead fundraiser on the Illinois Avenue playground project, Andrejasich noted. The construction manager was Don Johnson, an Evanston native and a UI student at the time, now a developer behind some of the new houses in East St. Louis.

"It was an important project in transforming those three empty lots, but also in people's lives, and it sticks with me," Andrejasich said.

Today, parks in East St. Louis are on Irma Golliday's mind as well. She heads the city's park system and also is on the school board, and she remembers when the parks were community focal points. She wants to bring back the family reunions and the picnics.

The UI is assisting with the effort in a variety of ways, including organizing and publicizing a "park summit" this fall to get input from local residents.

"It's weird to have your homework actually apply to something in real life for a change," said Chris Haab, a junior in integrative biology taking an architecture class, as he passed out fliers in September and urged residents around Lincoln Park on the southwest side of East St. Louis to attend.

A couple of months later, the students, members of Janni Sorensen's architecture class in conjunction with the action research project, presented a report to the park board on the results of the summit. Golliday was impressed with the students' idea for an outdoor fitness park, positioned such that parents and grandparents could keep an eye on kids at the playground while working out. East St. Louis lacks anything like a YMCA or a fitness club, so the facility would be a welcome addition.

"That was such a new and fresh idea," Golliday said. "I think that's something we could look into and make it happen.

"It's been a very good partnership, a very fruitful partnership. They didn't come in and say 'You should do' anything. They came in and found out what people wanted."

Support on campus widens

The UI program started in 1987 with some cajoling from state Rep. Wyvetter Younge, D-East St. Louis, who said she told UI officials that her community had all the studies sitting on a shelf collecting dust it needed, thanks. What it really needed was "more action" from the high-powered brains at the state's flagship university.

Started with architecture and planning faculty and students, it has attracted support around campus over the years, from the law school and engineering to the library school and recreation, sport and tourism, as well as history, music, computer science, social work and speech communications, among others.

"There's so much expertise on this campus and there's so much need down there," said Bruce Wicks, the recreation, sport and tourism professor who currently directs the program.

It runs on a relative shoestring - the budget has been about $268,000 and $293,000 the last couple years, from the College of Fine and Applied Arts and the provost - with a three-person staff. These days, ESLARP relies on about a dozen graduate research assistants who act as liaisons to its East St. Louis partners and spearhead individual projects.

The heyday came in the mid-'90s, when a half-million-dollar federal grant funded a staffed Neighborhood Technical Assistance Center in the city. But that money vanished with changes in Washington. Turner is the only employee left on the ground, so to speak, and the grad students, along with UI faculty, now perform most of the local office's functions.

"An ESLARP research assistantship is not easy," said Vicki Eddings, the program's administrative coordinator and unofficial den mother. "We require a lot of our students. There's a lot of travel involved."

Latonya Webb wishes the UI still had its East St. Louis office, where she worked for six years before returning to campus for her master's in planning and a job as a contracts specialist for the university. The local office made it easier for residents to access the UI's resources.

Webb is from East St. Louis and got her first experience with the UI program in high school, in a summer introduction to architecture it sponsored for kids in which they gathered input for and designed an actual neighborhood park. She had been thinking about becoming a marine biologist.

When she came to the UI for her bachelor's in urban planning, it was hard to travel home for outreach weekends with mostly white suburban kids whose outlook on East St. Louis was decidedly negative. But she came to see the trips as an opportunity to educate them.

She thinks the biggest accomplishments of the program aren't necessarily tangible: changed perspectives among the participants, a feeling of hope, that somebody cares, among its partners. Not that tangible accomplishments are lacking, she said.

"We have a tendency not to want to toot the horn, but they've accomplished a lot," she said. "Emerson Park would not be where it is today if it hadn't been for the work of the ESLARP project of the University of Illinois. I could say that for most of the neighborhoods that have seen improvements."

Victories large and small Champaign native Damon Smith was told stopping at stop signs or stop lights in East St. Louis was dangerous. He ended up working in the UI project as an undergraduate, a graduate assistant and the first director of the technical assistance center.

"I fell in love with the community itself," he said, and with its residents, who despite having been through "thin and thinner" kept trying to make things better.

"There are victories large and small that the residents are able to achieve every day," said Smith, now a law professor at Rutgers who focuses on urban planning and property law and their relation to local economic development and land use.

Smith said a major value of the UI program is that it connects people across geography, race and class, shows we're all part of the same fabric, society, community.

"I think that's important to all of us," he said. "That's sort of a profound and eye-opening thing that it's hard to quantify."

When the MetroLink installed an access ramp from its Washington Park stop into their north-side neighborhood, Dayton-Wedgewood area residents were pleased. But the city didn't come through with a paved walkway, which meant the ramp exited onto a dirt path that became a mire when it rained.

Lillie Butler pressed the city to raise the footpath and cover it with gravel at least. But it remained surrounded by thick brush and, after rapes and robberies, Butler pushed the city again to cut back the growth, which it finally did in October.

On a warm October weekend, UI students reduced the weeds to lawn-like height and installed landscaped flower beds and signs they'd constructed welcoming commuters to the neighborhood. The signs are done in blue and orange, Illinois colors and also the colors of East St. Louis High.

"Thank you very much, you all," a man getting off the train shouted as he passed, adding that his nephew is at the UI - and a star receiver from the high school's football team soon will be: "You'll like him."

Behind the scenes

Andrejasich said the program provides practical experience for UI students and opportunities for scholarship - in subjects like predatory lending in distressed communities and community-based planning - for professors.

Students from fields such as architecture and urban planning are expected to participate in the East St. Louis program, or something like it, to satisfy a "service learning" element of their training. But many participants are volunteers, still doing it after satisfying class commitments or without ever having been required to do it for school at all.

The outreach weekends a few times a semester tend to get most of the attention, and the sight of 100 or 150 college students fanning out to do good is impressive.

But Andrejasich and Webb said the work behind the scenes between the outreach weekends, and the accomplishments of community partners that it and the outreach weekends help facilitate, are the bigger part of the story.

Abby Harmon is a doctoral student in landscape architecture and a graduate assistant in the program. Like the grad students before her, Harmon is helping Martha Watts at Eagle's Nest, a shelter for homeless veterans, and Essie Calhoun at Opal's House, a shelter for battered women, negotiate the myriad details involved in opening the nonprofit facilities. Both will open soon.

She characterized her job as providing resources, technical assistance mostly, for people who have the capability but are short on the expertise and experience. She's hired for 20 hours a week but puts in more like 30.

"It's hard not to when you see people down here working so hard to get things done," she said. "You can't say 'I've put in my time limit, I can't do anything else.' "

Watts, who took early retirement as a VA psychiatric nurse to open Eagle's Nest, said the UI program has helped her file for nonprofit status, develop a constitution, a handbook and other required documents, and apply for grants. The university also provided a small army of students to improve the shelter's grounds this year.

"We never could have been able to afford to pay for the resources that we had access to," she said.

She might have given up without the help. But knowing somebody has your back encourages you to go on, she said.

A long heritage

The bus tour passes the old neighborhood of Ike and Tina Turner and Miles D. Davis Elementary School, home of the Bluenotes. Filmmakers Reginald and Warrington Hudlin and track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee also are from the city, Billie Turner tells the students.

A modern athletic center built by Joyner-Kersee's charitable foundation is on the city's north side, across from expansive Jones Park with its impressive fountain, albeit long out of service. When she was a girl, it was the "white park," Turner says.

The list of notable East St. Louis formers includes the renowned dancer, choreographer, songwriter, author, educator and activist Katherine Dunham, who died last year and is remembered at a museum in a former mansion near the downtown.

She left a lifetime's collection of costumes, art, performance-related documents and videos, personal papers and more in homes she owned nearby, which students in the UI Graduate School of Library and Information Science are painstakingly cataloging.

Wicks, who agreed to serve on the museum's board, said the collection could be a gold mine to scholars in history and the arts and a tourist attraction.

But first things first.

"We don't know what we have," he said. "How can we decide what to do with it if you don't know what you have?"

"There are hundreds of boxes," said Anke Voss, an instructor at the UI library school whose students are going through those boxes and also the director of the Champaign County Historical Archives. "Inventory is the first step."

"There's years' worth of work here," Wicks said.

Hope and vision

"My goal for the last five years has been to get it looking halfway decent," Joe Hubbard said of the old Catholic cemetery on the east side.

The graveyard is dotted with tombstones, faded and dating from the 1800s, with names like Boneau, Pensoneau and Toussaint, reminders of the area's French settlers. Down the street, a historic marker fronts a house built in 1818.

UI students set overturned grave markers back in place, trimmed weeds and picked up litter for Hubbard and Catholic Urban Programs. Lainy Stamos, a freshman in architecture from Palos Heights, said she thought the weekend would be a good way to get to know other architecture students. She didn't expect to end up in a cemetery.

"I was actually kind of surprised at first," she said. "But I think it is good. It's just a way to get people involved in community service. I think it's a really good idea."

Hubbard, director of the Catholic programs, is something of a rarity: a white native of East St. Louis who's stuck around.

"I've been here my whole life and walked the streets and never been bothered," he said.

The visits from the UI students are like "a shot of penicillin," he said. "(The action research project) has had a great impact on our community. We can all say it's a sewer, it's a pit, it's worthless. They still bring that hope and that vision."