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Grass Roots Effort at
Crime Prevention
In Buffalo Involves Seniors,
Pays Tangible DividendsBy Paul Chimera – After 50 News
June 2006

Seniors are helping Buffalo residents take back the streets, one community pocket at a time. If the cynical mantra of the 1960’s was, “Never trust anyone over 30,” today’s marching order might be, “Watch out for those over 50 – they’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore.”In increasing numbers, with growing confidence, and with marked effectiveness, the post-50 crowd is making a difference when it comes to perhaps the single most important quality of life issue facing urban Buffalo: crime. A chief exponent of this senior strategy is 53-year-old Marilyn Rodgers of Johnson Park in Buffalo. She has spearheaded a host of initiatives aimed at fighting back against crime in the city. And she and a team of other community shapers are getting results, including the growing participation of more confident, less afraid seniors. They were once afraid to show up at outdoor block club meetings.

They were scared to “get involved,” says Marilyn. Not anymore. “Marilyn has been instrumental in the Johnson Park pocket, trying to make it a safer neighborhood. She works diligently day in and day out,” said Chief Donna Berry of the Buffalo Police Department’s B District. “A lot of people complain. Marilyn does something about it.”

Rodgers, whose professional background has spanned everything from event coordination to quality assurance to training and motivation, received her “calling” on that fateful day of Sept. 11, 2001. Flying back to Buffalo from a vacation in Charleston, South Carolina, she thought it was odd when her plane rumbled uncharacteristically as it made an abrupt and early descent at Reagan Airport in Washington, D.C.

“I Realized It All Meant Nothing”
It didn’t take long before she learned of the twin towers terror in New York, the downed jet in Pennsylvania, and the crash into the Pentagon, whose black wall of smoke she witnessed from a distance. Rodgers took a one-way rental car back to Buffalo, and “I realized that all that I do professionally (she worked at the time at Remarketing Services of America in Williamsville) meant nothing. All I wanted to do was take the back roads, where people lived. The farm houses, the country roads and such. All the prestige I had meant nothing. There had to be something more.”

There was plenty more awaiting her in the city she’s called home all her life. But it wasn’t pretty: Buffalo’s first park, Johnson Park, dotted almost nightly with people shooting heroin between their toes, drinking booze, sleeping under trees.

Mad as hell and unwilling to take it much longer, Marilyn Rodgers began to transfer many of the skills she honed in industry to a more social arena – a community focus aimed at returning the streets to the law-abiding citizens who deserve to live in peace.

She took an old block club and redeveloped it into a 501 (c) 3 charitable organization, which became today’s Johnson Park Association, of which she’s been president since September 2002. It’s been nominated for a “Great Public Spaces” Award, and was honored as a recipient of a “2004 Buffalo-Niagara All American City Civic Empowerment Award.”

Rodgers also formed the West Village Renaissance Group (WVRG) in 2003, which has put additional muscle into the overall effort to clean up the community. The WVRG’s stated mission is to provide suggested plans and ideas to those in the seat of government.

Buffalo’s West Village includes the area from South Elmwood Avenue to Chippewa Street, south onto Georgia, turning north on Prospect and then northeast to Carolina and east on Tracy.

Some also consider its borders to include the remainder of South Elmwood to Niagara Street and all the streets that are included in this area.

The West Village has been designated an historic district under the City of Buffalo and New York State’s Landmark and Preservation Ordinance and the federal National Register of Historic Places.

Buffalo Common Councilmember Brian Davis of the Ellicott District told After 50, “Marilyn is a community jewel. From where I sit, I see her as someone who’s dependable, who you can call on for her advice, whom you can count on to be there. Whether it involves community cleanup or trying out strategies dealing with blight and crime in the neighborhoods. She’s so resourceful and so willing to work.”

Davis, who’s known Rodgers since he’s been in office about five years, adds: “I’m selfish when it comes to Marilyn. I find it difficult to share her with other folks!”

No Longer Afraid
Some of the West Village Renaissance Group’s programs are relatively basic, such as providing training for older residents on how to deal with con artists and various door-to-door, neighborhood awareness tactics.

“We need to open up communication, neighbor to neighbor to neighbor, no matter what the age is, so we can avoid those horrendous pitfalls that come along,” says Rodgers in a clear and soothing voice consistent with her having been an announcer on WBLK radio in the early 1980s. “Unless we include everybody, including our youth, it will only last three to five years. Then we get tired and can’t continue and the neighborhood falls apart. And it takes another five to 10 years to rebuild it again.”

True to form, youth and seniors and most everyone in between are taking a greater role in being the eyes and ears of law enforcement in the historic West Village and throughout an expanding community swath.

Seniors, especially, were afraid at first to get involved. They feared making emergency 911 calls, because it might mean they’d be identified, what with the police appearing on their porch and drawing attention. Nervous residents surely didn’t need that. But thanks to the West Village Renaissance Group in general and Rodgers in particular, “we provided a safe channel – my phone!” she explains. Residents afraid to call 911 directly are able to call her, who in turn can call the authorities.

In one case last January, a drug bust went down on Carolina Street and a woman was afraid to call 911. She dialed Rodgers’ cell phone instead. The culprit was later nabbed. Area residents have been taught how to identify, within 30 seconds, any suspicious person – how to estimate their weight, how to compare their height to a street sign. And both a Blog and Web site have been set up to further educate citizens on crime control and related matters: http://wvrg-buffalo.blogspot.com/ – http://www.westvillage-buffalo.com/

Rodgers likewise has turned her attentions, and those of her fellow volunteers, torooming house violations. Rooming house owners have been hauled into court over the deplorable conditions of some of their properties, inside and out. They were so bad at one time, Rodgers remembers, that she’d be talking to tenants while cockroaches were crawling up their shirts. “I smelled the stench and said this is absolutely ridiculous that people have to live like this.”

The Borders Will Start Touching
Rodgers, who has a B.S. degree in professional studies from U.B., with a focus on nonprofit/business administration, did some research and is now working on introducing new legislation into the city charter to make rooming houses better and more accountable to tenants. But while legislation may be pending, proactive grass roots tactics are already becoming law on the streets. Now, all of a sudden, tenants are reachable and getting respect. Rodgers and her fellow community workers are able to talk out issues with them. If one complains that he or she doesn’t have heat, for instance, they’ll make sure they get heat. One tenant had actually taken to cooking for some of the others now, and in fact had become a tenant contact for the Johnson Park Association.

And this advocating for your neighbor spirit is catching on. People on West Tupper have begun asking if they, too, can become a part of the West Village organization. “We’re expanding our borders,” says Rodgers. “There are pockets like this all over the city of Buffalo. We hope to expand the borders so much that they start touching.”

Rodgers says much of the community effort to take back the streets, to deal with youth initiatives, elderly initiatives, and crime and safety issues, boils down to common respect. “We started treating the rooming house tenants as neighbors, and the 911 calls were reduced dramatically. We need to look at every walk of life and can’t be a “nimby” (“not in my backyard”).

Wisdom From Mom
Common respect and common courtesy were lessons learned from Rodgers’ mother, who passed on in 1974. An only child, she adored her mother and today acknowledges her as the leading mentor in her life. She learned from her that “you will respect other people when you have both common sense and common respect going at the same time, no matter what people do or don’t do for a living. Common sense goes along with common courtesy and respecting one another,” she declares.

Back to Common Sense Principles
Common sense is the underpinning of Rodgers’ overall approach to her volunteer activities, while she pays the bills as a consultant and grant writer. “I have a passion for things that fulfill the whole sphere of community,” she relates. “We can have big corporations, politicians, areas of the City of Buffalo that are very well to do, and manicured lawns. But unless we have the other things that really fill out the fullness of the community – arts and culture, an appreciation for the resources we have in this area…,” it means little, she believes. “If we start teaching the kids, then we use our folks that are over 50 to be mentors to today’s children, and maybe we can start going back to common sense principles.”

Another initiative that’s gaining momentum in Buffalo is an internship for sustainable communities, designed to involve youth age 12 to 17 by giving them a summer stipend to help spruce up the exterior of homes owned by elderly citizens on the east and west side of the city. A pilot program is being worked on and is expected to be fully operational by the spring of 2007.

The program would have youths doing snow removal, flower planting, lawn mowing, leave raking and similar jobs. They would also get to attend police district meetings with neighborhood leaders, attend housing court, community police meetings, block club meetings for their districts and Common Council meetings. “In other words,” says Rodgers, “we’re training the youth of today to be community leaders of tomorrow.”

But seniors are by no means left out of the equation. In fact, two leading Buffalo Board of Block Club leaders are Linda Freidenburg and Ada Hopson-Clemons, who have taken over from the very involved senior citizen, Louise Bonner. While the youths in the sustainable communities effort would be fixing up seniors’ homes and providing them with companionship and maybe some different views on things, the youths in turn would benefit from stories of the past, told by elders willing to share their memories.

“They’ll get to hear the stories of the past,” says Rodgers. “This world is too fast today. It would be like back in the days of the tribe – the stories get passed on from generation to generation. And they learn that it’s good to communicate.”

Rodgers, who theorizes that maybe she gets her drive from being an only child and from her mom stressing how important people are, likens beautifying a neighborhood to inviting people over for a barbecue. “You can beautify a neighborhood, but we have to clean up the neighborhoods (of crime). It’s like having a backyard barbecue. You have to clean up the yard before inviting the folks over for the barbecue. Our new police commissioner is great. He’s open to working with other police entities. He’s put a chief in place at every one of the districts. They’re opening up community policing even further. The B District people are concerned and are stellar to work with.”

“Police in the area know our names now,” adds Rodgers, whose house on Johnson Park was a porter’s cottage, built circa 1830, once owned by Buffalo’s first mayor, Ebenezer Johnson. “Police will drive up and down the streets constantly. They waive to people, and the people wave back. They walk around. They talk to neighbors. They know our names and we know theirs. It’s not exactly Dick and Jane and Spot yet, but it’s getting there.”

Marilyn Rodgers is a Community Shaping Consultant. Her website is: www.mrodgersfcs.com.

Marilyn can be reached by e-mail at mrodgersfcs@msn.com or by phone – 716-440-1106.