Click above to see more photos from the North First event
What’s Happening? is a regular blog update that will feature snippets of the many opportunities, notices, events, and activities happening in the Cleveland Neighborhood and the greater Northside community. If you have something you’d like featured on the blog or in this post please send it to cna@clevelandneighborhood.org
Known anyone looking to buy a home in the Cleveland Neighborhood? There’s Down Payment Assistance available for those buying in the neighborhood. Learn more.
A Town Hall with the Commissioners from Human Rights and Revenue is happening tonight.
You should be getting a flyer from the Parks this week in your mailbox. It includes some great coupons for upcoming Park events.
The first of a series of quarterly community gatherings for Northside residents, neighborhood organization boards, and staff kicked off quite successfully this past Tuesday at the Capri Theater. The evening was full of socializing, networking, information sharing, delicious food and non-alcoholic beverages for happy hour, as well as some great presentations and prizes. Take a look at some of the great photos from the evening on Facebook.
The Cleveland Neighborhood was well represented with residents, board members and staff in attendance. The event was also hosted by the Northside Neighborhood Council, a collaboration of north Minneapolis neighborhood organizations of which the Cleveland Neighborhood Association is a part.
If you missed this event, be sure to mark your calendar for the next one June 11th, 6-8pm. We’ll serve some delicious food again and feature some wonderful speakers again, which could be you!*
*Details on submitting a presentation for an upcoming event will be posted at NorthFirst.org in the coming weeks.
In continued collaboration with the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota, Cleveland staff and Hennepin County staff served as guests for a design critique for student projects that focused on a redesign of Cleveland Park, with consideration of the Penn and Lowry corner.
The design covered a vast array of ideas and possibilities, many a complete redesign of the entire space, some including existing park structures. The goal of the project for the students was to simply work with a real life example for their course. They used community feedback gathered from last fall’s Park project and surveyed the site with Cleveland staff earlier in the semester.
This summer we’ll share the wide range of designs with residents and park users at an event in the park. The value of a collaboration like this for the Cleveland community is the great visuals from the students designs can help educate residents about what’s possible for our community and to learn about design elements that we might not be aware of in thinking about community space. This knowledge will help better inform our community so that we can better ask for what we want and give feedback to community projects and to developers and government entities that might be interested in developing the space.
Stay tuned for more of the designs posted online and at one of our summer Community Development gatherings.
Spring is almost here, summer is around the corner, and that means we are gearing up for Live On The Drive! If you haven’t put it on your calendar already the dates are June 13th, July 11th, August 8th from 6-8pm on Victory Memorial Parkway. Like it on Facebook to get all the updates. This summer, like we kicked off last year, we’ll be partnering with the Minneapolis Parks to bring you Movies in the Park after the concert each evening this summer. Which movies will be showing? That’s up to you!
Leave your suggestions in the comments. We’ll be using the suggestions to form a list of about 5-10 movies that will be part of our Audience Choice voting for each of the upcoming Live on the Drive – Movies in the Park features.
Stay tuned for a lot more info about Live on the Drive soon, but for now share with us that movie favorite you’d love to watch with your neighbors on the Parkway this summer!
March Mayhem is this Sunday, 1-4pm at Cleveland Park and we’re dubbing it the Snow Fort Flash Mob! Come join your friends and neighbors and have one last day of fun in the snow. We’ll build the biggest snow fort we can at Cleveland Park to enjoy before the snow melts away.
Bring your friends, bring your neighbors and join us for some winter fun. If the weather is frightful, we will be in the Cleveland Office (south end of Lucy Craft Laney School) to play board games and card games. Refreshments will be served.
[button link=”https://www.facebook.com/events/334391143327467/?fref=ts” type=”big”] RSVP on Facebook[/button]
For more info or Questions call the office 612-588-1155
Street Forum – Outreach Specialist – Part Time Temporary Independent Contractor
Summary
Engage transit riders in a conversation about transportation, gather contact information and interview them on video sharing their input on transit.
Example of duties and responsibilities
● Standing at bus stops talking to those waiting for the bus
● Using a tablet device to show a brief video to residents
● Using a video camera to ask questions of residents and interview them
● Gather contact information for community residents interested in learning more
● Upload videos to the website
● Document when videos were taken, at which stops and times of day
The part-time Outreach Specialist will be responsible for talking to residents and gathering their input on the topic of transit. This person needs to be outgoing and effective at inviting residents to participate in the project. They should be familiar with the transit system, ideally a frequent public transit user themselves, and willing to become knowledgeable about the topic of future transit development. They should be comfortable speaking in public and presenting information in a clear and concise way.
This position will require a flexible schedule and the ability to stand for extended periods of time. This is a temporary position that will end around October 2013.
Please email a letter of interest to hiring@clevelandneighborhood.org
During the summer of 2012, the Cleveland Neighborhood Association staff and board began to utilize some of the great tools provided by an organization called Civic Center to engage residents in conversations about their community. We hosted a community gathering in the Cleveland Neighborhood with the theme, “I Want _____ in my neighborhood.” We continued using the stickers and asking the question at our Live on the Drive summer concerts and while out in the community during National Night Out, door knocking, Cleveland Park parties and more.
Our amazing Mural installers!
Then, last fall, we had the opportunity to collaborate with a couple students from the U of M design department and some northside residents to try another community engagement project originating from Civic Center. A large mural that provides chalk and asks residents about their hopes and dreams with the prompt: “Before I die I want to ____.” These murals have been successfully done all over the world, including in the Whittier neighborhood in south Minneapolis and with youth at Kulture Klub. We felt it was a great opportunity to turn a vacant lot into an interactive space for residents who often don’t have voice in the community to share with one another their hopes and dreams in a public space.
We received a permit from Hennepin County to install the mural on the empty lot at the North West corner of Penn and Lowry Avenue. We also received support from the Minneapolis Arts Commission, who gave the following reasons:
“The mural strongly engages the community and generates hopeful responses.
Candy Chang and this project are internationally recognized.
The Whittier neighborhood has had a positive experience with the same project.”
We asked several residents about the choice of wording before deciding to keep the identical language to the international project, recognizing that it had some chance for controversy, but that the provocative nature of the question is part of what made it a successful project.
Our goal with this project was to engage the diverse residents that we serve in our community. We feel we’re accomplishing that, but did not realize it would also offend many others. Our ongoing commitment is to engage the residents of the Cleveland Neighborhood and the northside. We are willing to take risks and try innovative ways of doing that, but we realize we’re making mistakes along the way and learning as we go. We believe we will continue to learn from this experience and hope we can do far better in the future.
Whose mural is it? The Cleveland Neighborhood Association owns the mural. It was put up with support from some students and staff at the University of Minnesota. The concept for the mural is a part of an international series of Before I Die murals that originated with artist Candy Chang.
How often is there profanity? There have been 13 instances of inappropriate language on the mural that the CNA staff is aware of, out of well over 200 total statements written. The most notable of those instances are ones that a resident took a picture of on December 22nd and has circulated widely on Facebook. Those statements were written sometime in the evening before and removed within 2 hours of the first facebook posting. While the circulation of this single image has given the impression that the board is frequently filled with vulgar language and profanity that has not been the case.
Does anyone monitor it? Staff at the Cleveland Neighborhood Association monitors the mural multiple times a day. The chalk is removed when the spaces fill up or no one is able to monitor it in a 24 hour period. We recognize this is a public space and though the question elicits a variety of responses, we remove those that are unreadable or inappropriate for the space. We are not able to monitor the board 24/7 and do encourage residents to remove inappropriate language if they deem it necessary, but please do let us know so we can keep accurate and transparent documentation of the project overall.
What was with that hole in the mural? On Sunday, January 20th, the panels of the mural came off during a windy day. We recognize this incident was due to a mistake in installation materials. We removed the panels from the sidewalk and left the frame standing as we discussed reinstalling the mural. We reinstalled the majority of the mural on January 29th. The mural had recently been featured in the February North News and we felt it was important to have it up as soon as possible. However, when reinstalling we realized one of the panels broken edge needed to be glued together to be properly replaced. That step took longer than expected and we replaced the missing panel section on February 13th. We recognize that many found the missing panel unsightly and we apologize for not fixing it sooner.
Isn’t the word “Die” inappropriate for our community? We are aware of the unique implications the use of the word “die” has within our community were youth violence has caused tragedies in our families and communities. We recognize that this public display has appeared insensitive to some whose family has been personally affected by this violence in our community and for that we are sorry. Other young people and residents we’ve talked to have seen the choice of language as powerful for the same reason. We also recognize others see it as willingness to not skirt around language in an attempt at better community PR and still others disagree with that point. We are learning from all of this, we’ve made mistakes along the way, and we know that when this project is over we’ll look back and recognize how we could do it better.
Is this temporary? Yes, this is a temporary installation. The permit we were given goes till June, but we hadn’t intended on keeping it up that long. It was never intended to be a permanent installation. Our plan has been to move, disassemble or repurpose the piece sometime in the next few weeks. That decision will be decided by the Cleveland Neighborhood Board. CNA has been actively involved in the possible future development of this corner for some time and we continue to support the eventual development of the Lowry-Penn intersection.
Join your neighbors this spring for the first of our quarterly 2013 North First social events. This is a great opportunity to get to know other residents and neighborhood organizations and community, enjoy some delicious food catered by Avenue Eatery, and hear some brief presentations about a variety of topics of interest to neighborhoods. Come for a bite and stay for some conversation. Just make sure you reserve your spot today!
6:00-6:30pm Social hour
6:30-7:15 Presentations
7:15-8:00pm Networking and information sharing
The work that must be done to bring north Minneapolis neighborhoods into tomorrows vision for healthy neighborhoods will take some heavy lifting – it is work better done with friends! So, join the Northside Neighborhoods Council and learn more about the next steps – they are ours to take together – and you need to tell us what you think those steps should be.
Make your reservation now. We look forward to seeing you on the 12th, and bring a friend who might be interested!
The CNA Board and staff spent our Saturday on a retreat, thinking about, brainstorming and discussing how to better serve the Cleveland Neighborhood. We’re hoping our efforts result in stronger connections within the board and with the community. If you’d like to schedule an opportunity to sit down with the staff or a board member at CNA and share some of your hopes and dreams for the community, give us a call at 588-1155. We’ll buy you a cup of coffee at the Lowry Cafe and take time to listen to your hopes for a better Cleveland Neighborhood!
If you haven’t had the chance to take a look at our community-vision for Cleveland Park, you should. Others are, including the University of Minnesota which featured it on their Design at Minnesota website this month. Our partnership with the U of M continues with students doing design work projects related to Cleveland Park, Penn Avenue and Lowry Avenue. Their work is a learning opportunity for the students and can serve as idea-sparking and concrete examples of what might be possible in our community. If you’re interested in seeing and giving comment on student work on March 14th, please contact the office, 588-1155.
Here is what U of M professor David Pitts had to say about the collaboration:
This semester, Professor Dave Pitt’s (Landscape Architecture) class, Creating Landscape Space, will use Cleveland Park and the adjacent development at Penn and Lowery Avenues as study sites for their class project. “A very important part of the syllabus in this course,” explained Pitt, “is for students to learn that there is a real world containing real people with whom the design process must be a collaborative process if the ideas generated are to have any lasting value.”
March Mayhem is this Sunday, 1-4pm at Cleveland Park and we’re dubbing it the Snow Fort Flash Mob! Come join your friends and neighbors and have one last day of fun in the snow. We’ll build the biggest snow fort we can at Cleveland Park to enjoy before the snow melts away.
Summary
During the summer of 2012, the Cleveland Neighborhood Association staff and board began to utilize some of the great tools provided by an organization called 
Join your neighbors this spring for the first of our quarterly 2013 North First social events. This is a great opportunity to get to know other residents and neighborhood organizations and community, enjoy some delicious food catered by Avenue Eatery, and hear some brief presentations about a variety of topics of interest to neighborhoods. Come for a bite and stay for some conversation. Just make sure you reserve your spot today!
