If there is an unwritten code behind Oxford’s life, the first might be that most work gets done at your local (pub). But equally as important would be the imperative to “define your terms.” So, in the finely held tradition of slightly mocking Oxford, while taking its bigger critique to heart, I’d like to somewhat facetiously define a neighborhood meeting:
Community meeting: a gathering in which, regardless of the reason for its convening, someone stands up to complain about potholes.
While this is by no means the academic definition of such meetings, it is the one that I used as shorthand for my own field work in New Orleans. If I went to a “community meeting” and no one got up to rant and rave about potholes, grocery stores or not cleaning up after dogs (the neighborhood holy trinity), I would simply assume that the neighborhood wasn’t there.
Naomi Eisenstadt, one-time head of the British Sure Start program (their version of Head Start) told my class at Oxford that you could tell who showed up to a community meeting based on their recommendations. If the suggestion was more nurses, then nurses had shown up. If it was more teachers, then teachers had shown up. If it was psychiatric serves, psychiatrists had shown up. And if it was cleaning up playgrounds and dog poop, then the community members had shown up.
What Naomi Eisenstadt calls the “poop and playground” coalition is critical to understanding community meetings. Often these rants are lambasted as off-topic and discarded as non-sequitors. But doing so misses the broader point. Community members are in a struggle that goes beyond the specific items on an agenda. In fact, they are making a broader argument for what should go on the agenda.
This played out at a recent Camden City Council meeting. Several community members got up to suggest changing the site for a proposed ShopRite to the site of the recently closed Pathmark.
The Council ignored such requests, arguing that the agenda-item in front of them was the ShopRite and its proposed site on Admiral Wilson Boulevard. The complaints were dismissed. But they were indicative of a wider battle; the battle of who gets to decide what is an “option.” So often, by the time community input is called for, the options have already been restricted past the point where input is needed. Community organizations want to be involved early and often in deciding what the options are.
So when a neighbor complains about a pothole, a playground, or someone not taking care of their dog, I wonder, why are they complaining about that here? Where is the forum for their agenda? Disrupting a meeting to talk about a pothole isn’t a non-sequitor, it is the last resort of an activist who can’t seem to get his priorities on the agenda.
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