The Denver Foundation held its annual Strengthening Neighborhoods party Friday night. When it celebrates again next year, a table should be reserved for folks who despair that people of different cultures will never be able to work together in this city.
The gathering itself is evidence that this kind of collaboration happens every day. Such efforts do not generally draw attention to themselves. They start with neighbors who see a problem. These neighbors tend to be possessed of initiative and stamina, and they see not just what is but what could be. They do their work with purpose, outside the limelight and its love of conflict.
It doesn’t always come together, but when it does, what you end up with is something like the gathering Friday at the Bruce Randolph school “cafetorium.”
At least 200 people, black, white, Latino, multilingual, elderly, young. Different life experiences; shared interests. In the education of youth, in the strengthening of family, in the creation of neighborhoods where resilience replaces surrender. What you end up with is roomful of people who decided that what they do for one another, for the betterment of their communities, transcends all differences.
There’s nothing kumbaya about it. This work calls for the kind of honest conversation most people avoid. It demands trust across barriers of class and language. It requires flexibility of mind and spirit.
When it comes together, it’s a triumph.
I was reminded of this at last year’s party and again at this year’s, where I had the pleasure of sharing a table with Robbie Bean, who showed up in a sweeping hat, matching suit and fur wrap, an elegant tour de force.
I first met Bean five years ago, and someone warned me then, “You don’t say no to Robbie Bean.”
When Bean arrived in Denver in the early-50s, she found even her master’s degree didn’t help her, a black woman, get a teaching job. But when she did land that job teaching first grade, she stayed with it 37 years before retiring in the mid-90s.
I use the word “retire” loosely. In 2005, this once-a-teacher, always-a-teacher from northeast Denver dreamed up the idea of an intergenerational, educational field trip to South Dakota. She told me at the time: “Learning happens in many ways, not just out of a book, and young and old can teach each other.”
Five trips later, she is going strong. This past July, she led 85 people from Denver to South Dakota.
“Don’t get me wrong, we go sightseeing, but it’s an education tour,” she says. “Everyone has homework. If you just want to sightsee and gamble, well, you don’t go with me.”
It was while I was at the party that I learned about the Beeler Street Community Garden.
Even now, with winter soon upon us, the garden is beautiful. Pass through the gate, beneath an arbor covered by grape vines, and laid out before you are neat plots in a lot framed by towering cottonwood trees. The cold has not yet leached all color from the garden, and the ground is punctuated by purple cabbages, marigolds, an herb, burgundy in color, favored by the Karen refugees, growing in tall, feathery stalks. Had I been here in July, I would have found Koreans gardening next to whites next to Spanish-speaking immigrants next to refugees from Burma. Had I been here last month, I would have witnessed the community potluck and had a chance to sample Jack Franssen’s zucchini pie.
Had I been here in the mid-90s, I would have found a vacant lot turned dumping ground. Back then, a neighborhood matriarch named Doris Emsley had a vision of what could be and the city of Aurora believed in it.When Emsley died in 2004, she had the satisfaction of having seen the lot become not simply a source of sustenance and beauty but a cultural crossroads and an anchor in a neighborhood where people are always coming and going.
You would never know the garden was here. It sits at the end of a cul-de-sac off 16th Avenue and Beeler Street and is surrounded on three sides by low-income apartments. Franssen, who has been gardening here a year, has become so drawn to the place that he spends 20 to 30 hours a week among the plots, cleaning, clearing, planting. “It’s just a reminder of something I learned a long time ago,” the retired construction worker tells me. “People are people and some are bad, but most are good.”
Ivy Hontz, who has been gardening here for about five years, puts it this way: “It’s a gathering place, and I have met people I would have never otherwise met. We comfortably kind of enter each other’s world. . . . It’s about the relationships. If we didn’t like each other, trust each other, we wouldn’t be here.”
The Denver Foundation gave $342,000 to 197 projects last year. Nearly 200 stories of neighbors working together, hidden in plain view.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
