/ I possible cottage industries that could be run by volunteers to provide income for the organization. Albina Ministerial Alliance AMA Family Day and Night Care Program 1425 N.E. Dekum P.O. Box 11423 Portland, OR 97211 503/285-0493 "A family day-care provider is really important when both parents are poor and both parents need to work. She needs to be a person who cares and is willing to do more than she ordinarily would. If there's someone there to turn a child around before he or she gets to jail or becomes a juvenile delinquent, it makes a difference," Kaye Stewart affirms. Kaye is one of the family day-care coordinators at AMA's Family Day and Night Care Program. The program began in 1970 as a support service for day-care providers, who are licensed in Oregon to provide child care in their homes as a small business. The goal of the program is to promote quality day-care by enabling providers to enhance their child development skills and business management skills. To this end, services such as matchmaking and placement, information and referral, technical assistance with fiscal problems or nutrition, a monthly newsletter, and a resource center that loans toys, books and equipment are provided. Funding comes from both public and private sources. Albina Ministerial Alliance itself is an association of over forty ministers in North and Northeast Portland organized to encourage, support and fund programs providing social and cultural enrichment to those who live and work in the community. The day-care program responds well to the community's needs. "If parents with young children are to continue working, they need child care, and if providers are going to continue to care for children, they need to be compensated," Kaye explains. This spring the Family Day and Night Care Program began facilitating a skills and service exchange. A parent can reduce the cost of child care by providing transportation or gardening, for example, in return for a few hours of child care. A cooperative neighborhood child care 72 Kay Stewart of the Albina Ministerial Alliance arrangement is also in the works. Child care would rotate from home to home, shared among a group of parents living in the same community. For the future, Kaye would like to see more diversification and more involvement with the community, such as helping young teenage mothers to manage their homes and budgets more effectively. Richmond Park Richmond Neighborhood Association c/o Southeast Uplift 5224 S.E. Foster Portland, OR 97206 503/777-5846 Forty years ago, victory gardens grew there. Ten years ago, most of the schoolyard was paved. Five years ago, a neighborhood needs survey revealed a need for more open space and recreational area in the Richmond neighborhood, and the schoolyard of Richmond Elementary emerged as the best bet for a small park. Although Portland is a city noted for its neighborhood parks, no park existed within a mile of the densely populated (18,000 people in 1.4 square miles) Richmond neighborhood. "Kids needed some other outlet besides the streets and vandalism," explained Adrienne Stacey, chairperson of the Richmond School Playground Committee. "Senior citizens and small children needed someplace within easy walking distance that was accessible without crossing any major streets." Bureaucratic delays plagued the project after it received a $40,000 Housing and Community Development (HCD) block grant in 1977. The school district, as the property owner, had to approve the plan. School officials balked at the HCD regulation allowing the school only four hours per day of exclusive use. Consequently, the city government intervened and got the federal government to agree to six hours per day of exclusive school use. By the time the school and the neighborhood association approved the master plan and work could begin, it was September 1980. Volunteers pitched in. A National Guard unit tore up an acre of asphalt in front of the school, graded the land and put down topsoil. The "volcano"—a climbable mound with a sliding board that was "conceptualized before Mt. St. Helens went off"—was built up with the broken-up asphalt. Old Portland street cobbles donated by the Portland Historic Landmarks Commission for the volcano's surface were laid by the Masons and Bricklayers Apprentices Union. Nurseries donated trees. Honeywell Protection Systems sent twenty volunJudith Rafferty
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