While I hear your point about the Boys 'n Girls Club, I have to say that
you're take on Phillips Neighborhood Improvement Assn. and People of
Phillips is counter to the history of both organizations. The true
struggle in Phillips, vis-a-vis any neighborhood organization, was the
size of the population and the size of Phillips. There were over 17,000
people in Phillips and the territory covered a huge chunk of real
estate. There was no way a neighborhood organization without any funds
to speak of (PNIA) or a newly formed and suddenly wealthy organization
(POP) could reasonably be expected to contend with. The size of Phillips
made effective volunteer work an impossibility.
On the day the infant NRP had the ceremony to pull the first names of
neighborhoods out of the hat to determine which neighborhoods would be
the test cases for the concept of NRP, Earl Craig, the first director of
NRP sat behind me in the auditorium. I heard him say, loudly enough to
be heard by five or six people, "Please, God, don't let it be Phillips."
SSB opened the egg and read out, "Phillips."
There was no way Phillips as a single entity could succeed. There was no
way for neighborhood people to really get their arms around all of
Phillips. The task was overwhelming. In my more paranoid moments, I used
to think that the size of Phillips was a plot to keep people from
succeeding at making changes in their neighborhood. But, like most
things that drive us nuts, it was more a case of a variety of mistakes
made by different influences along the way, the sum of which produced an
impossible situation.
WizardMarks, Central
once a stringer for the Alley Newspaper in Phillips (1987-92)
gemgram wrote:
<>Speaking of ... out of spite the City killed the neighborhood
organization and replaced it with the Muddy Waters project that resulted
in the City of Minneapolis creating the old corrupt "People of Phillips"
organization that it took ten years to finally die from its own corruption.
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