Report to the West Bank CDC:
Community Organizing in Cedar-Riverside
During Summer and Fall of 2001 Randy Stoecker, in collaboration with
the West Bank Community Development Corporation (WBCDC), embarked on a project
to assess the community organizing needs and resources in the Cedar-Riverside
neighborhood of Minneapolis. This neighborhood defended itself against a
government-developer coalition that would have replaced the neighborhood
with high-rise buildings in the 1970s. In the wake of its victory, a community-controlled
development process created low and medium density cooperative housing in
the 1980s.*
In the new millennium, the neighborhood has changed dramatically. In place
of the community of 1960s radicals who defended their neighborhood and redeveloped
it is now an energetic immigrant community of Somali, Oromo, Vietnamese,
and Korean residents along with the remaining older community members. The
changing population has brought new challenges and opportunities and the
WBCDC is thinking about how to best serve this changed community.
This report actually has three sub-reports.
The
Primer on Community Organizing was distributed to WBCDC board members
in September of 2001 to outline some of the general approaches to community
organizing.
Communities, CDCs, and Community Organizing was distributed in October
to help board members understand some of the issues facing CDCs wanting to
do community organizing.
Community Organizing in Cedar-Riverside, Present and Future, was distributed
in December of 2001 for initial comments and the final version was distributed
in January of 2002. This report includes the needs and resources analysis
of the neighborhood.
The project also resulted in a community organization
directory for the neighborhood.
The next step is for the WBCDC to discuss the community options available
to them, based on their understanding of the neighborhood's needs and resources,
and begin to develop a plan.
*see Randy Stoecker, Defending Community: The Struggle
for Alternative Redevelopment in Cedar-Riverside, Temple University Press,
1994.