teers to lay sod and put sawdust on the earth mounds around the volcano. Most importantly, neighborhood residents joined the Saturday morning work parties. Using volunteers isn't always expedient, but it does foster community involvement and creative solutions. By contrast, the Parks Bureau built the Sunnyside School Park in one month with a $150,000 grant. At Richmond Park, however, "if someone is interested in doing something that the school approves of and that fits into the master plan," Adrienne encourages, "there's lots to do." Southwest Locks c/o Southwest Neighborhoods 7780 S.W. Capitol Hwy. Portland, OR 97219 503/248-4592 What do you do if your neighborhood is not poor enough to qualify for a subsidized locks program, but some of its residents can't afford to buy them? The answer for the people of Southwest Portland was to start their own locally controlled, volunteer-staffed lock installation program. "We really rely more on people than on funds," says Joy Strieker, neighborhood coordinator for Southwest and administrator of the locks program. In an era of shrinking federal budgets, it may be a wise choice to depend on local people and not on government funds, but in this case the shift was not voluntary. Southwest Portland is simply too affluent on the average for it to qualify for the federally funded lock installation program that several other Portland neighborhoods take advantage of. Those averages, however, disguise the fact that many southwest residents are low-income and cannot afford to buy locks and hire installers to make their homes safe. That is why in November of 1980 the Southwest Neighborhoods board decided to take the initiative and become more self-reliant in crime prevention. At the time they had about a thousand dollars to work with. The money was left over from another government crime prevention program that the board had dropped because it seemed too bureaucratic and difficult to deal with. The board used this money to buy several hundred locks, plus several tool sets, and then set about finding volunteers willing to install them. The Portland police cooperated by offering training sessions to teach volunteers how to install the locks and how to make a routine security check of a house. Under the locks program, each house must have a security check before being eligible for a free lock. During the first year the program put locks in thirty Southwest homes. The pace has been picking up steadily and requests now come in at a rate of ten per month. Volunteers will oftentimes do the "little extras" also, notes Strieker— repairing loose window frames or rehanging a badly hung door. She also sees it as a "valuable way of identifying people who might have other problems—such as senior citizens who aren't mobile enough to meet all their own needs or are isolated from their neighbors." Strieker believes the potential is great for the expansion of neighborhood- based crime prevention—"any real crime prevention that takes place is going to have to be a neighborhood effort. I'm convinced that people can do a lot for themselves if you just give them a chance," she says. "If you give them the information and the tools to begin with, there's all sorts of talent out there." From the outside. Food Front looks much like any other neighborhood corner grocery, its plate glass windows inviting people to drop in. Look closer. though, and you'll notice the community bulletin board outside, the bulk foods inside, and volunteers doing most of the work. Food Front is a food cooperative. "The kind of thing a co-op tries to do is pretty overwhelming: to change the economic basis of society. Energy, food, housing—all of these should be cooperatives. People shouldn't be making profits from them," affirms Food Front manager Theresa Marquez. "In co-ops people take responsibility for something that's a part of their life. Ownership, control and economic democracy are the basis of co-ops." Food Front owns its building, and the story of how that came to be is a lively one. When the landlord decided to sell the dingy warehouse space the co-op had called home for most of its ten-year history and the co-op was reduced to month-by-month rental, co-op members formed a committee to make a decision. Rather than buying the old warehouse or leasing another building, they decided their best alternative was to build a new structure suited to their needs. Community support, often from unlikely sources, coalesced. The site was located within the Thurman-Vaughn corridor, which had been dismissed as a possible freeway site three years before but had never resumed its full use potential. Tom Walsh Construction Co. was responsible for the first project there, a block of low-income houses. Walsh agreed to build the structure designed by architects for Food Front, with modifications to allow for multiple use if the deal fell through. Next, the Northwest Neighborhood Federal Credit Special check-out at the Food Front Food Front 2635 N.W. Thurman Portland, OR 97210 503/222-5658 73 Judith Rafferty
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