Because
Fourteen years ago I walked Lilac Street for the first time. I don’t remember exactly what day it was, but I remember the heat in the air, the children on the sidewalks and street, and adult sitting on their porches and stoops. I remember the block was alive in a way I hadn’t ever experienced ‘neighborhood’ outside of the movies.
The diversity of the cultures and stories comprising the characters of the unfolding narrative of this block took only a minor understanding of the nature of the world to see. One house, what appeared to be three generations of Latino heritage. The next, Middle Eastern parents and children. The next, a gathering of African American women who shared strong family resemblance. The next, multiple households of Nepali ancestry gathered on the grass. The next, children from one of the hill tribes of Burma/Myanmar that I had not quite come to be able to differentiate yet. And so on and so forth. There weren’t more than five households on the block from any one ethnic/cultural heritage, despite the multi-unit homes lining the block which had 40+ families who called this one little block home.
For months, some friends and I had been delivering furniture, sharing meals, and forging friendships across the Syracuse’s Northside with the resettling refugees and New Americans who had come to call this city their new home. I had been drawn to move to these streets by their friendship that merged into a sense of family, with ‘auntie’ and familial terms on our lips. But on this particular warm, summer day, on this memorable block, it took that sense of being drawn to being magnetized.
We crossed the threshold of 129 Lilac Street that day for the first time. My companion that day, Liz, was in the coming days to become my housemate, fellow dreamer, and ultimately (in an unforeseen twist) my sister-in-law and mother of my firstborn nephew. There were five bedrooms in the house, so we set out to fill them, moving in months later with myself, Liz, Joe and Theresa (empty nester married couple) and Agnes (newly arrived Congolese women resettling in Syracuse).
I have told the story of the forthcoming months a thousand times over on stages, media interviews, coffee conversations, intern trainings and more. It centers me to recount it, beckons me back to those inciting days when the world felt like it was at our doorstep to be explored, friendships to be discovered, and beautiful stories to be written.
And all of that was indeed true. I have been blessed over the last fourteen years by the people who showed up at my doorstep with stories like ‘this was the first place I felt like I was home in this country.’ Or ‘remember when… look at my life now.’ It’s only fourteen years, but I often feel like a bit of a great-grandmother in the recounting now, as I have watched at least four ‘generations’ of the ‘Hopeprint Family’ come and go. Each generation has different major characters who influenced our shared narrative, and a multitude of others whose own stories contributed to our collective narrative. Our family tree is wildly diverse and incredibly beautiful.
As the punches of the pandemic and so many societal shifts and otherwise took hold over the last few years, we came to the sad conclusion that we needed to sell the family home. This literal and even more so figurative decision to sell 129 Lilac Street and reconfigure nearly everything to respond to changing times was, as one might imagine, incredibly difficult, absolutely necessary, and ground-shifting many of us who have been invested over these years.
Though it felt like a good deal of closing and endings, we finished 2023 with what felt a bit like a seedling from the garden, ready to be re-planted. Throughout the pandemic-impacted years, we had been blessed to (somewhat miraculously) work with our community to build out a reinvestment strategy for the 35+ blocks including and surrounding this block of Lilac Street. They were the blocks families had invited us to their homes on, whose children had walked over for summer youth programs, whose women had forged friendships in Her Village from, and more. There was no tangible reason on the horizon to cause us to feel and say so, but we knew in our bones that development was coming our way and we needed to be ready so our families, who have almost all been displaced against their will multiple times in their lifetime, would not be displaced again. Unfortunately, global trends tell the repeating story: (a) neighborhood disinvestment, (b) bottoms out with major cost decrease, (c) developers buy up for the purposes of profit, (d) reinvestment put into community, (e) rents and sale prices skyrocket, (f) existing residents displaced against their will.
In 2019 when we started asking our neighbors, “If you had money to invest in our neighborhood, what would you spend it on?” or “Why do you love this neighborhood? What would you change about it for your family to have the life you wish for?”, it seemed a bit of an unrealistic dream or an unfounded fear. Yet, we kept knocking on doors, masks on our faces and all, and kept asking questions. Together we crafted the West Pond Microneighborhood Reinvestment Proposal, released just months after Micron announced their historic investment coming to our region and months before NYS DOT won the lawsuit to officially redirect and deconstruct the raised interstate, moving it to community grid. Billions of dollars. Coming.
For the last five months, we essentially shut down operations to ‘retool the factory,’ this little seedling in hand being nurtured and watered with but a sense of hope. As we did, a familiar thing began to happen, we re-found that 2010 soul… or maybe I should say that even more personally, I re-found that 2010 soul. And just as it was fourteen years ago, I’m walking Lilac Street, now seasoned with the scars of the storms and the vivid sense of reality, far more jarred by the violence of our physical space than I used to be, and working far harder to maintain hope. But it is there.
In 2010, we moved in with no bank account, no fundraising strategy or even intent. Just our lives and our paychecks from other jobs we worked by day to be present with one another by night. And somehow, people showed up. I mean, people came from the most unexpected of places at just the right times, and made our story possible day after day. The storyline of Hopeprint is prolific with people who showed up in all kinds of ways to ‘leave their hopeprint.’
As we launch Hopeprint’s renewed work in their neighborhood under the moniker West Pond Alliance, I believe this little seedling holds the same beautiful unfolding in store. And you, my friend, my neighbor, stranger, onlooker, and all, you are a part of that story.
We are still here because we believe that sometimes the winds blow and the waves roar, the fire destroys so much of what we thought was important, and at the end of the day we actually find that what mattered the most survived. We are stepping into our renewed story because we believe the work is far from done. The foundation has been laid with blood, sweat, and tears, but the rest calls for the next generation to build it. In some ways I wonder, have we been here fourteen years for such a time as this?
I am here because a dozen families fed me tea, welcomed me into their lives, and called me friend. And still do.
And I am here because of all the years and all of the ‘generations’ who have spent time in these streets, I believe it is this ‘generation’ that is emerging now, standing on the shoulders of those who have come before, that are in our moment of truth. That quite possibly, this is the climax of the narrative. When all hope was but lost… then.
Welcome to being, West Pond Alliance. Let the next chapter of this beautiful story begin.
West Pond Alliance is a wholly owned subsidiary organization of the 501c3 organization Hopeprint Inc, whose mission is to facilitate sustainable development in the West Pond Microneighborhood of Syracuse, NY’s Northside under the oversight of the West Pond Vision Council, made up of local residents and proven stakeholders of the West Pond Microneighborhood.
