Clean Your Heart(side) Out!

“People see the historic buildings, they see all different types of people, and they’re not quite sure what they’re looking at – we who work in the neighborhood space are constantly thinking of the 4,000+ residents, and how do we show up in ways that a more typical neighborhood shows up?” Alysha Lach-White, owner of Little Space Studio on South Division, poses this question as a founding member of the Heartside Downtown Neighborhood Association (HDNA). “Cleansweep is a great way to get a lot of people on the same page about the neighborhood by caring for the space they live in … it’s an effective visual reminder that we’re actually a neighborhood,” she answers.  

Heartside Cleansweep, taking place on April 29th at Heartside Park from 9:00-noon, is an annual community cleanup where residents, college students, and other volunteers come together to beautify spaces throughout the Heartside neighborhood. Last year, over 70 volunteers worked on various projects including park mulching, window washing, planting flowerboxes, and cleaning up trash on the street.  

The volunteer event, organized by Dwelling Place, the HDNA, Aquinas College, DGRI, and Grand Rapids Parks, has been happening for over 15 years. 

Father Bob Keller of Aquinas College references the historic connections of faith and justice in the Catholic tradition. as the outcome of this has been an institutional pattern of community service work. “There’s these ideas of charity and justice: charity is saving drowning babies out of a river, while justice is going upstream and finding out why there are babies in the river … It's great to partner with groups like Dwelling Place and the HDNA, because [the justice work they do] is the part we don’t see with Cleansweep,” Fr. Bob explains.  

“Heartside is a kaleidoscope of culture – every type of person lives in this neighborhood – which means there’s a range of folks to accommodate,” Lach-White adds. Fr. Keller shares similar experiences: “There’s going to be conversations and people to meet that you’ll never get anywhere else, and that’s a really exciting mix.”  

Aquinas, being a non-Heartside institution, tries to be sensitive to the neighborhood’s context. Fr. Keller talked about the mindset of being an outsider doing community work: “There’s something about the common good, that we’re all in this city together. There’s something also about it not being our neighborhood, that it’s not just about us or caring for our space for ourselves … though we are concerned with this thing that [volunteers] don’t get a messianic idea, like ‘we’re coming to save the neighborhood.’” 

Alysha also recounted some challenges of community work: “Communication has always been a challenge. There’s still a hesitation, a feeling that even if you report something, nothing is going to happen … Cleansweep has always been a great opportunity to improve communication between people who are trying to take care of the neighborhood and people at the city level.” 

Communication is only possible when the right people are receiving the message. Lach-White recognizes this and sees Cleansweep as a prime opportunity to bring in relevant voices to leadership spaces. “We serve people in a very quickly growing and changing city, so representing neighbors in the Heartside/downtown space is continuously a challenge … both [Cleansweep and the HDNA] are ‘come as you are,’ new-faces-appreciated-type-of- opportunities; if anyone is ever interested in various forms of community change or advocacy, we try to be a vehicle for that.” 

 
This article was published with the help of the Heartside Downtown Neighborhood Association and its board members. To learn more about them, their mission, or to apply to serve on the board, visit www.intheheartofgr.org. Thanks to Jared Stephenson, Hope College Social Work intern for writing this article.