Opinion: Neighborhood Associations Need New Blood

I have sat in enough neighborhood meetings to notice an uncomfortable pattern: the same dedicated faces, year after year, doing the work while the room around them stays small. Our associations are not short on mission. They are short on successors.

This is not a complaint about the people who do show up. They are the reason anything functions at all. It is a worry about what happens when they stop, as everyone eventually does, and no one trained is in the room to take up the work they put down.

These groups do real things. The Lowry Hill East Neighborhood Association runs a Food Share out of the SpringHouse Ministry Center at 610 W. 28th St., open on the second Saturday, third Wednesday and fourth Saturday of most months; in 2025 it moved nearly 60,000 pounds of groceries and helped more than 10,000 neighbors, according to the association. LHENA is also chasing something bigger. On March 16, board President Jason Garcia signed a memorandum of agreement with CommonBond Communities to pursue affordable housing in the long-empty former Herkimer brewpub at 2922 Lyndale Ave. S., a $2.5 million building the city has helped seed with $500,000 in Neighborhood Revitalization Program funds under a working title, "LynLake V2". All of it depends on volunteers who will not be at it forever.

The math is unforgiving. An organization that does not steadily recruit new participants is aging toward a cliff, and a full calendar can disguise a hollowing-out underneath, right up until the year the events do not happen.

Newer residents, especially in our many rental buildings, often assume the associations are not for them, or that someone else has it handled. Both assumptions are mistakes. LHENA was opened to renters decades ago and holds open monthly board meetings -- the third Wednesday of the month at its 2744 Lyndale Ave. S. office -- with committees anyone can join. The someone-else who has it handled is precisely the overextended volunteer this column is worried about.

I understand the barriers. People are busy, meetings run long, and the regulars can look like a settled in-group a newcomer would only intrude upon. But that impression is almost always wrong. The in-group is tired and would welcome the help; the Food Share lists a volunteer coordinator, Joan, who can be reached at [email protected].

If we want the Food Share to keep running and the Herkimer deal to close, the answer is not admiration from the sidelines. It is showing up, taking a small role, and eventually a larger one. The volunteers we rely on are building something worth inheriting. The least the rest of us can do is make sure there is someone to inherit it, while the people who know how everything works are still here to teach us.