Better involvement of blacks and Hispanics in a neighborhood planning process is the focus of meetings this week in North Little Rock’s Levy area.
The drop-in meetings will be 3 p.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday at North Heights Community Center, 4801 Allen St., and then 4:30 p.m.-7:30 p.m. Wednesday and 10 a.m.- 1 p.m. Saturday, both at Seis Puentes Hispanic outreach center, 4202 Camp Robinson Road.
The drop-in format will allow residents to come and go, instead of sitting through a lengthy presentation and discussion.
Levy is among five central Arkansas communities - North Little Rock’s Park Hill neighborhood is another - to have been awarded a Jump Start grant of up to $200,000 each in federal planning assistance funds.
Jump Start is part of Imagine Central Arkansas, the latest major update to a 30-year plan by Metroplan, the region’s long-range transportation planning agency. Metroplan is coordinating the Jump Start initiative.
The outreach to the black and Hispanic communities in Levy follows earlier neighborhood meetings where the audiences were overwhelmingly white, organizers reported.
“The representation was nowhere near the actual demographics of the area,” said Nathan Hamilton, the city’s Communications Director, about the lack of diversity at the Levy meetings. “Our meetings weren’t looking like North Little Rock.”
Jenna Rhodes is organizing this week’s meetings, having been involved in the Jump Start initiative as part of her work toward a Master’s Degree in Public Service from the Clinton School of Public Service. Rhodes collected demographic information at the Jump Start meetings that provided the statistical data to show “there was a big gap we wanted to fill,” she said.
“Levy is a very diverse community,” said Rhodes, who is also completing a Master’s of Public Health degree at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. “When we looked at the numbers, we really just weren’t seeing a good representation of African-American families and Hispanic families.”
Meetings held in Levy on Feb. 27 and March 1 were both at Levy Baptist Church. This week’s meetings are scheduled at sites chosen to specifically reach black and Hispanic residents, Rhodes said.
“These targeted meetings are in the communities we want to reach,” Rhodes said of this week’s meetings. “We will go to them.”
Richard Magee, deputy director and planning director for Metroplan, said that North Little Rock’s renewed effort is a good one “to try to reach out and use a different tactic.”
“Obviously, the problem is making sure that everyone has a chance to participate and, at the last public meetings they had, it seemed like those groups just didn’t respond to that venue,” Magee said.
Having meetings more focused on specific groups, Magee said, will help to make sure everyone is “represented by a common vision and what that common vision is for Levy,” a neighborhood that has changed demographically in recent years, he added.
Rhodes spent time last week talking with local parents at North Heights Community Center and sent fliers home with children who use the center to help get the word out about the meetings.
Methods to get attendance at the earlier meetings didn’t reach deep enough into the black and Hispanic communities, she said.
“We just didn’t have a lot of connections in either one of those communities,” she said.
“I think we didn’t realize how lacking our contacts were in those communities.”
The drop-in format, she said, is also meant to help provide time for residents to take maybe 15-20 minutes to give their input.
“The program at the first meetings was two hours long and you had to stay for the whole thing,” Rhodes said.
“People are just really busy and don’t have the time. We want to provide an opportunity for them to give input, but also want to respect their really busy lives.”
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 04/21/2014