Why Can’t We Be friends: Working on a Philly Park Friend Group

By Caroline van Zeijts

November 1st, 2019

I have been involved with a park friends group since my move to Philadelphia. (For more information on how Philadelphia public parks are run through these groups, check out this toolkit.) My engagement at the park has included weeding, working the farmer’s market and participating in events through the summer. Through folks I have met on the board, I have gotten involved in canvassing and organizing for the upcoming vote on November 5th. Working with new voting machines in a rapidly gentrifying piece of the city (the 27th ward), I find my connection as a Penn student to be a point of opportunity and also deep discomfort for many of the members of this neighborhood I have been organizing with. (To learn more about Penn’s relationship to West Philly, check this and this out.)

Sometimes it can feel like there is a barrier to entry with community engagement implicit in years of service or existing relationships. In the setting of this Friends group, it is a badge of honor to be a long-standing member of the park and of the 27th ward, with one woman living in the house her family has owned since 1911. This older demographic adds an angle to this organizing that I usually don’t intentionally consider. There is a pace to the work, a patience to which the members will listen to each other as they piece together what they are trying to say, that offers love in the radical act of being present and caring for the shared space of the park and the surrounding neighborhood. 

For many members, the work we do on the board and in the park is a life line. Personally, when I sit at the farmer’s market, the same older folks come around and share stories of their weeks with me. It is clear that these moments are sacred and needed for them (usually, I can’t fit a word in edge-wise). At the board meeting, the president of the board said how parks are like libraries: we all share and profit and need to be gentle and generous in our treatment of them. This mindset is the backdrop to the more particular acts, which sometimes manifest in an argument over if the dog in the new graphic looks too much like a cat or a comment about the need to welcome varying events into the park. The passion was clear in each comment, request and suggestion at the meeting I went to. This passion, whether channeled into the big or the small, is what holds the park up and keeps this space alive.

To me, Yuval-Davis’ politics of belonging are a huge part of engagement. Who would and would not be comfortable standing in front of a group of largely white older people to explain themselves and be judged and not feel triggered by small microaggressions enacted in large part by lack of awareness in older age? Part of working with this older crowd, especially of people who have lived in West Philly for so long, is an individual understanding of change in a very different way from how we talk about it in class. Their concepts of time and development are different from my own, which is an ontology I have to meet where it is if I want to create my own version of change.

In considering how this work fits in with our readings, I was struck by how far theory felt from this action-focused activity. What would a more decentralized and anti-capitalist understanding of time add to the work going on? One of the big pushes that the board was making, specifically in reference to the election coming up in the ward, was community training sessions for the new voting machines. June, who headed this, saw the change to new machines as dangerous to democracy and confusing to older folks. Yet, what she kept saying at the board meeting was that if they practice on the ward vote in November, they will know how to vote Trump out in 2020. In thinking about erasure, many of the West Philadelphians consider themselves “native” (ignoring the histories of the Lenni-Lenape) and believe that gentrification was really “stabilization” for what previously was a “crack-filled” neighborhood. The fact that it is white people still here to tell the tale says a lot (though there are also many older black women I have met who are members of the Friends and been living in the 27th ward for a long time). Yet, these same people pour their heart and souls into a public park that is used by a very broad demographic of Philadelphians. They have a sliding scale for their soccer camps for those who can’t pay the whole amount. They host Uhuru thrift sales, Spiral Q’s Personhood Parade and provide chess tables, picnic benches and chairs for the oft-performed drum circles. And then they huff and haw about the homeless in the park, stating that they go “somewhere, but at least not here” in the winter. This is all easier to consider when thinking about the theory of the complexity of personhood. Tuck writes, “This is what accounts for the multiplicity, complexity, and contradiction of desire, how desire reaches for contrasting realities, even simultaneously”(418). The desire of self-protection reaches while the desire for community also stretches in a different direction for many older folks on this board. I think there is a line that needs to be defined between people being allowed to be complex versus violent hypocrisy. 

Though the park board doesn’t talk directly about social justice or the radical act of a community coming together to sustain this public space, the lack of language doesn’t mean a lack of action. At the meeting, we made plans to stencil the new chairs and chess tables, I made a porch swing appointment with my neighbor June to discuss who is running for the November 5th election, an audit of the finances was followed by a request for public transparency about budgeting, and John told us about the fall time change for his Friday “Walks in the Park.” People made space for themselves and participated in a shared vision of the commons in a true and very human way. The park and my involvement in it has reminded me that community engagement is a fruitful gift, and can and should be filled with joy. 

Join your local park’s Friends group! Be a voice for what you want public community space to look like in your neighborhood.