"COMMUNITY SOLUTIONS"
OFFERS SOME ANSWERS
TO IMMOBILITY ISSUE

Being poor can mean going nowhere — literally being cut off from opportunities for a better life because there is no car, ride or bus available to reach them.

In St. Louis, MO, planners are working with community leaders to combat poverty by bringing people, jobs, services and information closer together and increasing mobility in new ways so these opportunities can be grasped.

The goal is a new planning framework that draws on the innovation and resourcefulness of people who live in a particular community. The project is being developed by a group of community activists, service providers and neighborhood leaders with the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council.

The Council, the regional council of governments for the City of St. Louis and seven adjacent Missouri and Illinois counties, is working to get the initiative moving with four or five communities in the region this year, including neighborhoods in St. Louis and East St. Louis, IL.

A report, now available, summarizes the project so far. "Community Solutions: From Poverty to Mobility," discusses immobility in the region and cites how some local groups are confronting the issue.

It's a timely issue because being able to afford or drive a car has become a basic requirement to being able to work, go to school or obtain services in the St. Louis area and in other parts of the country. Patterns of commercial and residential development in the last several decades have pushed economic opportunity away from the urban core of many cities.

As a result, new jobs have moved to beltways, malls and campuses — away from the urban core where many poor people live. And in places like St. Louis, a stretched and financially constrained public transit system cannot provide easy access to where many of these jobs are located. Middle class families also have abandoned old city neighborhoods. Crime and disorder have become concentrated in inner city municipalities as commercial services have moved to newly developed suburban areas.

Numbers paint a grim picture. Since 1960, the City of St. Louis' population has declined by nearly half and most job growth has been outside the central city. Half of all jobs are located along the Interstate 270 corridor in St. Louis County, west of the city limits.

Meanwhile, the poverty rate in the city and surrounding municipalities was nearly 28 percent, compared to the regional overall rate of 10.7 percent. More than half the region's poor live in these inner cities, even though they contain only 20 percent of the population.

To try to erase these images, the project examined the potential of coordinated transportation, social, education and employment services within a framework called "community-mobility strategies." These strategies came out of the Council's involvement in 1992-93 with a consortium of public agencies, non-profit organizations and businesses that examined and documented poverty involving families in the region. Such strategies are locally based responses to physical, social and economic immobility.

These community-mobility strategies have four principal objectives. These include:

• Bringing public services together in a common location or referral system.

• Promoting information sharing among agencies and within neighborhoods.

• Setting up transportation connections to bring low-income workers to jobs outside the central city.

• Fostering job creation and economic development in urban neighborhoods.

The report cites groups and agencies who have been able to accomplish some of these objectives. Their efforts draw on the people of a particularly neighborhood or area to overcome the obstacles of isolation and poverty. These efforts also often involve new levels of cooperation, and they demonstrate how public agencies and neighborhood groups can work together.

"Rather than deploy new public services, they reorient those services to allow comprehensive solutions in a community-based context," the report states.

Examples of how these community mobility strategies are being applied in the St. Louis area were outlined in the report. A wide range of groups and activities are involved. Some of the initiatives include:

• The Walbridge Caring Communities Program serves 550 families whose children attend Walbridge Elementary School in the impoverished Walnut Park neighborhood near the western edge of St. Louis' north side. The agency offers 12 services under a single roof including counseling, family crisis intervention, health services and student assistance. Classroom teachers make direct referrals to on-site case managers who then direct families to services. The program depends on the

September 1993 / Illinois Municipal Review / Page 11

participation of high-level state officials and a neighborhood advisory board.

• The Grace Hill Neighborhood Services' Member Organized Resource Exchange, also known as MORE, trains and encourages residents of selected neighborhoods in the city, and adjacent St. Louis and St. Charles counties to share information and perform services for their neighbors. They form what is called a "linkage network." Grace Hill is a multi-faceted community agency that provides a variety of health, child development and housing services in the region.

• The Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis works with Six Flags Over Mid-America, a suburban amusement and theme park, to transport 200 to 300 young people each year to jobs there. The firm contracts with a bus operator to make several trips between the park and the city, deducting $3 daily from each workers' wages. Urban League staff say a lack of transportation may be more significant than lack of skills in chronic urban unemployment.

These are but three of the 15 ongoing area initiatives that are discussed in the report. Having developed the community mobility planning framework during Fiscal Year 1992, the Council staff are now working with area communities who want to put more than one type of initiative in place.

"None of these examples represents a total solution. Nor does any supersede the basic services — education, health care, police protection and the like — that form the core of social policy," the report states.

"What is significant about these initiatives is that they draw on communities resources and knowledge to create new opportunities in the lives of disadvantaged participants."

"Community Solutions: From Poverty to Mobility" is available from the Council for $3. For more information, contact the Council at 911 Washington Ave., St. Louis, MO 63101-1295 or by telephone at (314) 421-4220 or (618) 274-2750.

Page 12 / Illinois Municipal Review / September 1993