There is no such thing as a neighborhood in its true sense, something more, that is, than the physical contiguity of people, until you have a neighborhood consciousness. Rows of houses, rows of streets, do not make a neighborhood. The place bond must give way to a consciousness of real union. This neighborhood consciousness can be evolved in five ways:
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By regular meetings of neighbors for the consideration of neighborhood and civic problems, not merely sporadic and occasional meetings for specific objects.
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By a genuine discussion at these regular meetings.
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By learning together—through lectures, classes, clubs; by sharing one another’s experience through social intercourse; by learning forms of community art expression; in short by leading an actual community life.
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By taking more and more responsibility for the life of the neighborhood.
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By establishing some regular connection between the neighborhood and city, state and national governments.
The most deliberate and conscious movement for neighborhood organization is the Community Centre movement. This is a movement to mobilize community forces and to get these forces expressed in our social and political life. Each community, it is becoming recognized, has its own desires, its own gifts, its own inherent powers to bring to the life of the whole city. But these inner forces must be freed and utilized for public ends. The Community Centre movement is a movement to release the potential values of neighborhood life, to find a channel for them to flow in, to help people find and organize their own resources. It is to provide a means for the self-realization of neighborhoods. In considering, therefore, the various methods of neighborhood integration, it must be remembered that many of these methods are being already actualized in Community Centres, School Centres, Neighborhood Associations—there are many names for the many forms in which this vital need is finding expression.
Schoolhouses are being opened all over the country for neighborhood use. In the larger cities, indeed, where school buildings have auditoriums, gymnasiums, cooking-rooms, sewing-rooms etc., the School Centre is for many reasons the best form of community organization. In some cities, as in Chicago, the field-houses in the parks are used as community centres, in addition to the schoolhouses. In many smaller towns or villages, where field-houses are unknown and the schoolhouses unsuitable (although often we find valuable if not showy results in the little red schoolhouse at the crossroads or in a Kansas cyclone cellar underneath the district school), “community buildings” are being built. Their name is significant. They have a reading room, library, rest room, club rooms and usually a small hall with stage for dramatic and musical entertainments.
And beyond this conscious effort to organize neighborhoods, or rather to help neighborhoods to organize themselves, much spontaneous initiative in both rural and urban communities, springing from the daily needs of the people, is finding neighborhood organization to be the result of concerted effort. Mothers want to learn more of the care of their homes, men want to discuss local improvements, young men and women want recreation, there is a hunger for a wider social intercourse or for some form of community art-expression, music or drama. Yet whichever of these motives leads us to the schoolhouse or the community building, the result is always the same—a closer forging of the neighborhood bond. Whoever takes the initiative in organizing the Community Centre—a parents’ association, a men’s civic club, a mothers’ club, a committee of citizens, the city council, the board of education—the result is always the same, a closer forging of the community bond.
The Community Centre movement has made rapid progress in the last ten years. All over the country new Centres are springing up constantly. That the impulse for their organization is almost as varied as there are different towns and cities is evidence of their real need. I have had letters in regard to the organization of Centres from as widely different sources as the city council of a western city, girls teaching in rural schools, the mayor of a small city, and young working men in a big city. Indeed Centres have become so much the fashion that one man came to me and said, “We want a School Centre in our district—will you help us to get one—what is a School Centre?”
In the year 1915–16, 463 cities reported over 59,000 occasions in public school buildings after 6 p.m. in addition to evening school work.81
But School or Community Centres do not exist merely for the satisfaction of neighborhood needs, for the creating of a community bond, for the expression of that bond in communal action—they also give the training necessary to bring that activity to its highest fulfilment. We all need not merely opportunities to exercise democracy, but opportunity for a training in democracy. We are not going to take any kind of citizen for the new state, we intend to grow our own citizens. Through group activities, through classes and lectures, through university extension, through actual practice in self government by the management of their own Centres and the varied activities therein, all, young and old, may prepare themselves for the new citizenship of the new democracy.82
Let us now consider the five ways given above for producing an integrated and responsible neighborhood. First, the regular meetings of neighbors in civic clubs. In Boston we have, in connection with the School Centres, the so-called “East Boston Town-Meeting,” the “Charlestown Commonwealth,” etc. At such meetings neighborhood needs can be discussed, and the men and women of those neighborhoods, while getting to know one another and their local conditions, can be training themselves to function with government and as government. The first advantage of such meetings is their regularity.
I am urging regular meetings of small groups of neighbors as a new method
