Hello my fellow neighborhood leaders,

This month of April was a wild one.   It came in like a lion and out like a lion as well.   I hope you and the people you care about were able to stay warm and dry as we welcome our shared spring in our own cultural way.  For me, spring means rebirth and a time to grow again.  Spring is the planting of my tomato garden and helping promote our southwest Denver community garden and sustainability fair.  Now is a time to reconnect with friends and celebrate the fact that we’ve made it through another winter.

For this president’s letter, I realize that many of you don’t really know who I am and what I stand for, so I’m going to take a minute to tell you a bit about myself.

I am a child of Denver.  I was born at DGH, I grew up in northwest Denver, and attended elementary –> high school in the DPS schools there.

As my alma mater, North High School’s most famous attendee, Golda Meir, said, “Don’t be so humble – you are not that great.”

I want to let you know that I’ve been a neighborhood and community advocate from early childhood because, well, it’s just the way my mom and dad raised me.  Growing up, I was constantly walking the streets, organizing neighbors, going to city meetings with my mom.  We constantly used our mass transit system because she didn’t drive, and my dad needed the car to get to his job.  What I learned in those years was that community and neighborhood advocacy display themselves in both support and opposition.  Neighbors, some of which still live in northwest Denver today, opposed police intervention that promoted criminalization of our youth.  They opposed building the I-25 expansion into our neighborhood, and they opposed the mentality that our neighborhood was depressed and needed revitalization.   At the same time, we, as neighbors, supported education and learning as the true path to a better standard of living.  We made projects happen, like planting trees throughout the neighborhood, building neighborhood parks, and laying flagstone sidewalks.  We started urban gardens and celebrated art and food.  We supported a cooperative relationship with police and other city departments.  My parents were active members of the DPS Parent Teacher Associations throughout my, and my sister’s, school career.  They consistently fought to bring resources to our resource starved area of town.   For all of these actions of support and opposition, we received friendship, an improved cultural legacy, and memories that define my northwest Denver past.

As the great Golda Meir also said, “One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.”

Being taught that college was the right path for me, I became one of only a handful of North High grads that were able to go out of state for college that year, ’97. (largely because of the cultural advantages that I was born into).  As I attended the University of Tennessee to become a computer programmer, I would come back to my neighborhood; my own place in the world, and find that it had begun to change.   Even before the last Blueprint Denver rewrite, my neighborhood of northwest Denver began changing rapidly.   New neighbors moved into the community, from all over the nation.  In general, I found, they had a clear desire not to integrate with the neighborhood that I knew, but instead to transform it.  They didn’t want to interact with their next-door neighbors, they wanted to be able to go downtown, or build buildings that brought downtown to them.   Over the years my childhood neighbors and community tried to integrate with the transformation, fight against it, or moved out.  Developers like Paul Tamburello transformed the northside and didn’t leave much of the culture that I knew in their wake.

When I came back home after living and working in Oak Ridge TN for the National Laboratory, and Chicago for the US EPA, I had to decide for myself, do I transform, fight, or move out?   I decided to do some of all three, because in this path, I see a way to fit my past into our present.

Now you know why I feel so personally offended when some say that developers run the INC now that I’ve been elected president.   I didn’t run for INC president because of politics, or profit, or malice.  I ran for personal reasons around using my skills to improve the world around me.  I ran because I want to organize and work with neighborhoods to help them avoid the pitfalls that are coming with the mass influx of new Denverites in the next 10 years.  I don’t want to see other neighborhoods, and their cultures, pushed aside.  The INC has always been, and will continue to be, so long as I’m president, a body that helps citizens through neighborhood empowerment.  We will continue to do everything we can to get the city to respect the will and desire of neighborhood organizations because it is us that are the eyes and ears of the neighborhood and the city needs to always include us.

Please join me and our new board of directors at our next INC Delegates meeting, which will be occurring in northwest Denver (3635 Quivas St Denver, CO 80211) on Saturday morning, May 14^th, from 9am – 11am.

Please see our events calendar for details.  (www.denverinc.org)

– JJ Niemann