I don't want to imply that either the first success with the new park, or the new library were easily achieved. Both required perseverance and ongoing recalibration. The difference between success and failure is frequently determined by who has staying power. The "powers that be" can count on initiatives running out of gas. Our strategy: never give up; never give in. And, let others take credit for a positive outcome.

::::::::

My guests today are grass-roots community activist, Howard Rieger, and his wife, filmmaker, journalist and fellow grass-roots community activist, Beverly Siegel.

Joan Brunwasser: Welcome to OpEdNews, Howard and Beverly. After a long and full career, you finally retired a few years back, Howard. Many of us Baby Boomers are facing that transition. Tell us, please, about how your retirement came about and what it's looked like so far.

Howard Rieger: I had always intended to take early retirement. At 40, I set my goal to do so at 60. In 2003, at 61, I let my lay leadership know at the Pittsburgh Jewish Federation, where I was President/CEO, that they had a year to search for my successor. Goal almost accomplished? Not quite. In the interim, early in 2004, I succumbed to a persistent ask that I take on the top professional position at Jewish Federations of North America. In 2009, at 67, I finally got to implement my plan, and I have never looked back!

Beverly Siegel: Let it be noted that in 2007, Howard's wife passed away, and in 2008, he met and married a lovely lady from his hometown of Chicago, who had lost her husband two years earlier. That's me.

JB: Nice! Along the way, someone gave you some good advice about "how" to retire. Can you share that with us?

HR: True. A few days before retirement, I went to Yeshiva University to thank a brilliant rabbi who had served as a scholar-in-residence at JFNA during my tenure. I told him what I was thinking of doing during retirement, and his advice was, "Don't answer the phone for a year...maybe two. After that, something will emerge." His words were prescient. Within two years, it became clear to me that my community-organizing expertise would be the perfect skill-set to address the signs of decline in our otherwise strong neighborhood in Chicago, West Rogers Park. And that's what I've been doing ever since. Over time, I've taken on other volunteer leadership roles in Pittsburgh, where we spend an equal amount of time. Giving back and making a difference. That makes retirement one of the most fulfilling times of my life, personally and professionally.

BS: Fortunately, the project that Howard took on when we moved back to Chicago was near and dear to my heart and exactly what I was hoping he'd choose: my neighborhood!

JB: Many of our readers know nothing about West Rogers Park. What's so special about it? And why was it in need of your help?

BS: In the 1950s and '60s, West Rogers Park was one of the most sought-after neighborhoods in the city. The housing stock boomed with new single-family homes and two- and three-flat apartment buildings, and the main commercial street, Devon Avenue, boasted shops for men, women and kids that rivaled elite downtown shopping areas. West Rogers Park became a magnet for Jewish families, and by the early 1960s, it was 75% Jewish. Change became noticeable in the '70s, as many of the kids who grew up there didn't come back after college; suburban shopping malls siphoned desirable shops off Devon and other city streets, and waves of south Asian and other immigrants transformed the neighborhood into one of the city's most diverse. The flux created uncertainty and instability, and it showed.

HR: When I first came back to West Rogers Park after 40 years of working and living elsewhere, I was struck by the dichotomy of a neighborhood in which homes were being remodeled and expanded, new homes built, millions of dollars invested in new synagogues and Jewish agencies, yet the public face of the neighborhood "showcased" all of the markers of a declining neighborhood; abandoned and defaced properties, a rundown branch of the public library, overgrown parks and empty storefronts were everywhere. After a year of networking with individuals and organizations to see why such neglect was allowed to happen, I found out that people had simply given up the hope that anything could change the situation and they never tried to do anything. I knew then that I had found my mission, to prove that they were wrong.

JB: Thanks for the background. It's helpful in getting a sense of what you found on the ground, so to speak. So, you found your mission. For those of us not well-versed in the mechanics of community organizing, it's a fascinating but mysterious process. How did you determine what to focus on as well as where and how to begin? Deconstruct the process for us, please.

HR: Once I saw the situation on the ground, I spent a year networking to find out what had been tried to address these problems. The short answer was: nothing meaningful. That led me to examine best practices elsewhere, always drawing upon my decades of experience in the community-organizing field, one based upon identifying needs and then coalescing the community to address those needs. I was fortunate to know of an outstanding Baltimore-based Jewish non-profit community-betterment organization whose executive director had been doing just that for over three decades, and when asked, had agreed to travel to Chicago for a two-day pro-bono consultation aimed at getting us on the right track. He worked with a group of community leaders whom I had identified, a group that launched Jewish Neighborhood Development Council of Chicago during the next year. That was the first vital step toward launching a series of advocacy efforts that over time, has changed the face of West Rogers Park.

JB: I admire the way you thoughtfully examined and analyzed and devised a strategy. So often it seems like efforts of this sort are 'one and done' and not well thought out, at least partly because they aren't part of a larger overall strategy. Would you like to comment on that? Then, tell us what came next!

HR: I was sensitive to the fact that even if we knew what we wanted to do, having expert input from the outside would increase our credibility. And the Baltimore consultant recommended that our next step should be to engage someone with a Chicago perspective to chart next steps. That led us to hire a former Commissioner of Housing for the City of Chicago who had become an independent consultant. His hands-on Chicago experience, enriched by his many national engagements, gave us the best of both worlds. He also brought a fresh perspective to our group. Chicago is a large city spread out over a huge geographic area. Our neighborhood is on the far North Side. He lived miles away on the South Side, a part of town with many more major challenges than we faced. While we tended to look at the downside of our neighborhood, he saw all of the strengths. At the end of eight months of working with us, he recommended that we establish a non-profit, and that led us to breathe new life into an organization created in the 1970s but which had stopped operating a few years earlier, the Jewish Community Council of West Rogers Park (JCCWRP). As good fortune would have it, one of the JCCWRP officers had maintained its corporate status and all we had to do was appoint a board and we could begin operations immediately. I agreed to become the volunteer president.

BS: Watching this process unfold was impressive. It put our issues into a larger, national context; it conferred a kind of gravitas, and I think it galvanized community leaders in the neighborhood to join the board and become part of our effort.

JB: Indeed. Let's talk about that process some more. I love delving down into the nuts and bolts of community action: how it works, and why it sometimes doesn't. So, I've got lots of questions. Who actually was a part of this group? I'm not asking for names of specific people but rather types of people. Did you enlist those with community action in their resume's, lovers of West Rogers Park, a combination or something else entirely? What makes for a good group, what's an optimal mix? What do you look for and what do you avoid? I imagine that this is really crucial to the ultimate success of a project. Share the recipe with us, please.

HR: From day one, the push to do something about the challenges in West Rogers Park came from Beverly. As we began our planning process, she was a key participant, enabling us to draw upon her expertise in public relations and her own experience over the years in Peterson Park, an adjacent neighborhood where she and her late husband raised their family.

As our first steps into doing something meaningful in West Rogers Park began to take shape, we coalesced a combination of individuals who had been active with the JCCWRP before it went into hiatus, two individuals who provided the funds to match a contribution from the Jewish Federation of Metro Chicago that launched our planning effort, and a few individuals new to the cause but who had a track record as volunteers with other community organizations. The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago also provided us with a professional who had staffed planning studies in relation to the neighborhood many years earlier. He gave us a reach into other Jewish agencies. Once we got through the planning phase and re-launched the org, hiring a part-time executive director was a key step in establishing JCCWRP as a real player in the neighborhood. Having Beverly as our volunteer PR consultant at that time raised our community-wide profile very early in the process.

BS: It helps to have feature stories with photos turning up in community newspapers! We also sent out frequent news updates to a growing list of email contacts. We created a website, though that's now under construction again, to tell our story to the community. And eventually I produced a video documentary about the history of West Rogers Park, highlighting the impact of the organization and its accomplishments in the neighborhood. It's called Driving West Rogers Park: Chicago's Once and Future Jewish Neighborhood.

I've made other documentaries that aired on public television in Chicago and at film festivals around the world, including a film entitled Women Unchained, hosted by Mayim Bialik.

JB: Yes, I interviewed you about Women Unchained, way back in 2013.

BS: I created the West Rogers Park video not for TV or festivals, but for community programming, education and organizing. But that came much later in our process.

JB: You did choose a distinctly different distribution path for this film. Can you talk a little more about how you decided to do it this way, why and how it's worked out so far?

BS: I had a particular story to tell, and I didn't want to subordinate my vision to commercial considerations. Basically, I wanted to marry a historical documentary to a close-up feature on the emerging accomplishments of a group of activists. And I wanted to tell the story with special appeal to a particular ethnic group to engage them in the work of preserving the neighborhood. The video seems to me too narrowly focused -- and perhaps too booster-ish -- to appeal to TV outlets, but local community groups respond very positively. The funding came from groups whose mission is consistent with ours, and the plan worked. The video premiered at the 40th anniversary celebration of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society, which helped to fund the project. It was well promoted, drew hundreds of people, and we've had many requests for screenings since.

JB: Good call. Now you've set the stage. How did you proceed from there?

HR: Our leadership had a seemingly simple objective, to bring a Jewish bookstore back to Devon Avenue, our main commercial street, to replace the one that had moved out a few years earlier. We had a lead to an entrepreneur in New York City who ran a bookstore there and supposedly expressed interest in opening one in Chicago. We went back and forth for over a year and went nowhere.

Feeling the pressure to show that we could accomplish something tangible that everyone could see, I decided to take on one of our most visible challenges -- an abandoned multiplex movie theater/carwash and adjacent three-acre barricaded parking lot that had been an eyesore on the western edge of our neighborhood for 12 years. It was covered with weeds growing up through broken asphalt; the buildings were covered with graffiti and broken doors and windows and surrounded with barbed wire. Then, we would truly establish our "street cred."

The challenge was that the parking lot was owned by an independent state-chartered government agency, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District -- think sewer treatment monolith. Even our then-alderman for 40 years, the "zoning czar" of Chicago, couldn't budge them from holding out for commercial development at a land cost of $1 million, which no one was willing to pay. That's why the movie theater and the carwash had gone out of business. They couldn't afford the parking lot! And that's why no other business was ever going to be able to locate there.

BS: We were going to hold a rally and push for TV coverage to demonstrate broad opposition to this awful blight and unsafe mess in our midst. But it was November, in Chicago, and getting too cold to expect many people to show up. So we changed the focus to a community meeting, in a big neighborhood synagogue. We promoted it to media and reached out to non-Jewish groups, and we drew an incredible coalition of about 150 Hasidic and other Jews, Latinos, and other ethnics. In the end, we got lots of media coverage for what came out of that meeting.

JB: So you really did your homework and got a great turnout and lots of media attention. How did you parlay that into concrete change?

HR: Just want to add a twist to the story. It is true that it was November, and that there was a horrible cold spell with temps dropping into the teens. On the other hand, we had a rally planned and we were committed to going ahead with it when I got a call from an elected official asking us to consider canceling the rally because it would really upset the mayor. Knowing that conditions were such that going ahead would likely have led to little-to-no turnout, I agreed, but did note that we would reschedule another rally one way or the other. That led us to go with the indoor approach a couple of months later.

As to how we parlayed the rescheduled event into concrete change, here is what happened.

When we announced the rally, we invited the executive director of the Water Reclamation District and our local alderman to address the group. The alderman didn't attend because of a scheduling conflict, but the Water Reclamation exec agreed to come, and actually showed up well in advance of the start time, as I was just checking out final room arrangements. Since we had never met, we sat and chatted for a few minutes, and he asked me what I wanted him to do, given that so many previous plans for the site had failed to come to fruition. I said that I thought it would be great if we could get the land for a park. He said that no one had ever asked for that before and yes, he could give rights to the land to the Chicago Park District for 66 years for $15 per year to develop a park. Two years later, we had the newest park in the city and had transformed the worst parcel of land in the neighborhood into a beautiful community asset.

Right time. Right place. Right ask!

JB: Wow! Lovely story. And I assume that resounding success gave you credibility to go on to do more. What was the next item on your list and what were the considerations that went into making it next up?

HR: Soon after the success with the new park, I was invited to attend a meeting convened by the Chicago Community Trust, the region's community foundation with assets in excess of $3 billion. Each year, the Trust holds such sessions in each of the city's neighborhoods, with the intention of encouraging each group to identify a project or program that might spark an initiative aimed at meeting an agreed-upon goal. I suggested that our objective should be to get a new branch of the Chicago Public Library to replace the current one that was nearly 65 years old, undersized, without the latest technology or parking. Not only was that idea immediately accepted, the chair of the session, a top executive at the Trust and a resident of the neighborhood, volunteered to chair an advocacy coalition. The LEARN Coalition become the motivating force for a campaign that garnered over 2,500 signatures on petitions that in the end proved to be the push that was needed for our elected officials to bring this dream to reality. Through a unique partnership between the Chicago Housing Authority and the Chicago Public Library, in early 2019, we marked yet another ribbon-cutting, this time at an outstanding state-of-the-art library on the ground floor of an architectural award-winning, 44-unit senior housing facility.

Sometimes, JNDCC can be the out-front force leading the way, as it was in our first success. Sometimes, it's better for leadership to emerge from elsewhere, as it did with the LEARN Coalition. In both instances, JNDCC played an indispensable role.

JB: I see how well that works, Howard, being nimble and able to either shoot or pass, as needed. How did you come up with the idea of the library branch in the first place? What I mean to say here is that, in retrospect, we see this as a brilliant move, a foregone conclusion. But hindsight is hindsight. How did you get there? What else did you consider? I'd like to understand the process better.

HR: Sitting in that meeting and listening to the ideas that were being floated such as an ethnic festival -- something that I saw as hard to promote and even if successful, having no long-term impact -- I tried to conjure up an idea that would have wide community acceptance. I had "inventoried" the assets of the community and knew that the library was a second-rate facility, compared to adjoining neighborhood branches. We had floated the idea with officials and were told that there was no money to get the job done. On the other hand, ours was the second-most utilized branch, and it seemed like a no-brainer to garner support from all elements of the community if we set out with a broad-based coalition to get a new one. Just getting in line with a request, even if it would take years to achieve a positive outcome, made sense to me.

I don't want to imply that either the first success with the new park, or the new library were easily achieved. Both required perseverance and ongoing recalibration. The difference between success and failure is frequently determined by who has staying power. The "powers that be" pretty much can count on initiatives running out of gas. Our strategy was: never give up; never give in. And one more thing, let others take credit for a positive outcome. For me, success is only measured on achieving the objective, not receiving accolades for doing so. Bottom line? I was really surprised how soon both objectives were achieved.

JB: Grassroots initiatives, however well-intentioned, so often just peter out. Yours hasn't. Thanks for spelling out the reasons why. What are you up to these days?

BS: We're moving forward with ideas for new enhancements to the neighborhood. But it's also important that we seek out ways to remind people of the successes of our past, for a few reasons. We're always fighting against an ingrained attitude that "it can't be done." So we need to inspire people to realize that yes, it can be done. And we need to push back against the tendency to take success, once it's been achieved, for granted. It's so easy to drive past the southeast corner of Devon and McCormick, for instance, float the eyes over the lovely sculpted park that replaced a festering disaster and forget that change happened -- forget that we had to come together, set a goal, stave off discouragement, stick with it, and see it through.

That all feeds into my reasons for making the documentary. I wanted to be able to draw hundreds of people into synagogues and other public spaces to kick back and savor the neighborhood's history, appreciate its uniqueness relative to other Jewish neighborhoods in the history of Chicago, and appreciate the importance of community activism -- and coalition building -- for preserving the neighborhood.

Having made other documentaries about Chicago history for public television, I had access to experts and archival material and historical information. I was able to put together a treatment, raise funds and craft a story, and put Howard's activism and impact on the neighborhood into the historical context of Jewish settlement in West Rogers Park. Interestingly, our recent period of activism hasn't been the only time over the nearly 90 years that Jews have lived in the neighborhood that "leaders" -- people who sought to impact the future of the community -- took bold steps and succeeded. Whether it was to allay fears that could cause people to abandon the neighborhood, or to make major investments in schools and synagogues to encourage people to stay, or, like Howard, to improve the physical appearance and civic amenities of the area to make it a more desirable place to live, the documentary tells that story.

We've had about 20 community screenings, each followed by discussion and Q & A. Along the way, we've generated a good amount of publicity, which has helped to spread the impact of the work even further. We're still getting requests for showings.

JB: I saw that film, which is great, and that's what led me to you and inspired this interview. You live part of the time in Pittsburgh. Do you do anything similar there?

BS: We showed the film at the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill to launch an advocacy campaign utilizing similar strategies to those depicted in the video but geared toward local goals.

HR: Just a point of order. Bev made the documentary on a pro-bono basis. She invested countless hours of her time doing the research, writing the script, hunting down the interviewees and working with the camera people and the editor. It's incredible to see her productions up close. For an outsider, it is hard to imagine how much effort goes into one of these projects.

JB: Thanks for setting the record straight, Howard.

HR: As to Pittsburgh, I have become involved in the battle to fight air pollution. Pittsburgh's image is that of the smoky city, an accurate characterization until the effort that enacted the first anti-pollution laws in the post-WWII years. That leads most people to believe that all is now well, but that isn't true. Just because small particle and ozone pollution isn't as visible doesn't mean that it isn't even more deadly, which it is. As a morning runner, I didn't like that there were too many days when the air was bad enough that I couldn't or wouldn't run.

So I decided to take my years of community organization experience into that fight as a volunteer leader. In fact, we used Bev's documentary as a launching pad for that effort. When so many friends and acquaintances kept asking to see what we were doing in Chicago, we screened the video in Pittsburgh, and at the end, I did a jump-shift, noting that since Pittsburgh and Squirrel Hill didn't have the same challenges as West Rogers Park Chicago, one could assume that there was no relevance to the film other than interest about our "other" life. The point I made was that it wasn't what we did in Chicago but how we did it...community advocacy and activism...that could be applied in Pittsburgh to push officials to actually do something to limit the problem of air pollution by doing something about the largest contributor to pollution and the health problems that it leads to: United States Steel and its Mon Valley Works. For a variety of reasons, the "powers that be" have chosen to ignore the facts, in favor of touting the city as one of the most livable in the country. Pittsburgh is a wonderful place to live, but being silent about what is literally killing some is not a good formula for building the region. We have coalesced a group of individuals who are joining in the fight and together with so many others, we are beginning to see some progress.

JB: I'm so glad you've taken this on. My daughter and her family have lived in Pittsburgh for the last several years and love it. But it has the potential to be a much better place to live and raise children once the issue of air quality is addressed. Anything you'd like to add before we wrap this up?

BS: I may get more involved in Howard's Pittsburgh project -- it's very exciting to see the progress he's helped to make -- but right now, I'm primarily focused on re-developing our website in Chicago, refreshing our image, and working with our new leadership to move forward on neighborhood goals, including bringing in a pop-up art gallery, a business incubator and hopefully a new fire station. From there, who knows?

HR: Just that real change can happen at the local level. It takes time and commitment to make change, but time after time, I have seen that it can be achieved. I believe that retirement is a great time to do things like this that can improve the quality of life of everyone, while giving me and others like me something truly productive to do. Giving back. By the way, my son in Pittsburgh is leading a start-up non-profit that he launched that is doing the same thing with Pittsburgh public high school students. I have been involved with that effort and it is a perfect complement to what people in my age category can do.

One last thing. It is a double pleasure to be able to do what I have been doing in tandem with Bev. Living and working with a public relations expert, editor and documentary film-maker keeps me on my toes and makes what I do so much better.

JB: A stellar example of synergy at work! I can't tell you what a pleasure it has been to talk with both of you. You are the antidote to those prevailing feelings of disempowerment and voicelessness. I hope that our readers are inspired by your story to do the heavy lifting involved in making their own communities better, safer places to live. Thanks again!

***

Very recent news coverage about this documentary:

BACK TO THE FUTURE: A new documentary looks at the Jewish neighborhood of West Rogers Park

https://www.chicagojewishnews.com/2018/04/back-to-the-future-a-new-documentary-looks-at-the-jewish-neighborhood-of-west-rogers-park/

My previous interview with Beverly:

"Women Unchained": A Filmmaker's Campaign to Promote Justice in Jewish Divorce 11/27/2013

Authors Website: http://www.opednews.com/author/author79.html

Authors Bio:

Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of transparency and the ability to accurately check and authenticate the vote cast, these systems can alter election results and therefore are simply antithetical to democratic principles and functioning.



Since the pivotal 2004 Presidential election, Joan has come to see the connection between a broken election system, a dysfunctional, corporate media and a total lack of campaign finance reform. This has led her to enlarge the parameters of her writing to include interviews with whistle-blowers and articulate others who give a view quite different from that presented by the mainstream media. She also turns the spotlight on activists and ordinary folks who are striving to make a difference, to clean up and improve their corner of the world. By focusing on these intrepid individuals, she gives hope and inspiration to those who might otherwise be turned off and alienated. She also interviews people in the arts in all their variations - authors, journalists, filmmakers, actors, playwrights, and artists. Why? The bottom line: without art and inspiration, we lose one of the best parts of ourselves. And we're all in this together. If Joan can keep even one of her fellow citizens going another day, she considers her job well done.


When Joan hit one million page views, OEN Managing Editor, Meryl Ann Butler interviewed her, turning interviewer briefly into interviewee. Read the interview here.

While the news is often quite depressing, Joan nevertheless strives to maintain her mantra: "Grab life now in an exuberant embrace!"


Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. Her articles also appear at Huffington Post, RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.