Playing His Part Don Higgins, The Director Of The West Central Community Center, Is Reinvigorating The Neighborhood

In the world according to Don Higgins, kids wouldn’t have to walk past burned-out buildings on their way to school. Neighbors would take responsibility, treat each other with respect and solve disputes without resorting to violence.

Perhaps it sounds utopian, but Higgins has spent 14 years working to accomplish those goals as director of the West Central Community Center.

Higgins, 48, says there is still a long way to go. But for the first time, he and others are claiming significant progress: the reinvigoration of a Spokane neighborhood by the residents themselves.

Many, too, attribute the success in part to Higgins, whom they describe as a visionary with a knack for inspiring others by example.

He calls it a case of Catholic guilt.

“You have this orientation for the world,” he says. “The world is wrong and has to be righted and you have a responsibility to play your part.”

Called “servant leadership,” his approach is to allow the neighborhood itself to come up with solutions to problems while he helps implement and sustain them.

“So many people love to pronounce from high on up and impose. Don doesn’t do that,” said Rex Hollowell, a philosophy professor at Spokane Falls Community College who lives in the West Central neighborhood and serves as the community center’s board chairman. “There’s not a whole lot of ego there, the sort that cries out for attention.”

Still, there’s no denying that it takes both vision and passion to move anything in Spokane - or that Higgins is bursting with both.

“He’s a critical factor in why this neighborhood turned around,” said Cheryl Steele, the organizer of COPS West, the first community policing effort in Spokane. Steele credits Higgins with being a source of the energy that keeps the neighborhood moving forward.

For Higgins the goal is clear: social revitalization of a neighborhood.

To accomplish that, Higgins says, one can’t just look at the schools or the churches or the police, but at each of those and at everything in between. That outlook comes from an inter-disciplinary education. Higgins studied political science, business and law. Even so, he is not one to avoid heavy lifting. He has helped paint neighborhood homes and rings doorbells around Cannon Park asking about gangs, drugs and safety.

Among his first achievements as director of the community center serving West Central, which has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the city, were health and nutrition programs for new and expectant mothers.

Children who don’t get proper nutrition are at a greater risk of academic failure. Many of those who drop out of school turn to crime. In an age when others call for spending money on more police, Higgins argues it’s far less expensive to prevent the problems early on.

Other programs at West Central - employment readiness, housing assistance, youth recreation, health and education - all advance Higgins’ philosophy that problems can no longer be solved in isolation.

“Kids can’t learn in school if they walk home past junk cars, there’s domestic violence in the home or their parents are alcoholics,” he says.

And all the programs reflect the basic tenet that people have to take responsibility for their own neighborhood.

“We will train you, we will give you the structure but you have to solve the problem,” he says.

The West Central neighborhood’s police substation has become the textbook example. It was launched after several hundred residents gathered for a neighborhood meeting at the community center days after the 1991 disappearance of Rebecca West and Nicki Wood, two girls abducted and killed while walking in the neighborhood.

Emotions in the neighborhood ran high, with many people blaming the police for their lack of patrol presence and slow response to 911 calls.

Higgins called it “a massive grieving session; everybody was angry and nobody knew what to do next.”

In what has become one of his classic exercises, Higgins made sure something did happen. He clarified the most pressing problems, got a commitment for action and an agreement on an agenda for the next meeting.

A few weeks later, a facilitator was brought in to lead residents through exercises and separate into focus groups. Each group then developed specific actions to solve problems.

“There was a lot of hurt in the neighborhood,” said Hollowell. “Don used that as an occasion to ask what can we do in this neighborhood to radically lessen the chance of this happening again.”

Project Pride was another outcome of the meetings where residents put pressure on the city to clean up junk cars and beef up enforcement of zoning codes. There was also a massive clean-up where residents tidied up their own porches and yards.

Part of the outcome, too, was a dialogue with police and the realization that law enforcement had limited resources. The neighborhood would have to resolve problems with barking dogs, illegally parked cars or loud radios by itself.

So Higgins and his staff started training residents to handle mediations. That, too, is becoming a model for neighborhoods everywhere.

When there aren’t enough leaders for programs, Higgins’ answer is to train them. The result was an eight-week institute for neighborhood activists who learn such things as how to manage organizations, resolve conflicts, lobby for money and address the City Council.

The institute has grown beyond even the city with the recent crop of graduates including a man who started a food pantry in Elk and two Spokane Valley women who volunteer in the Sheriff’s Department community police program.

Higgins is already at the community center three nights a week. He and school principals are sponsoring a forum on youth violence tonight.

Higgins, who was hired in 1980 from Catholic Charities, earns just under $45,000 a year, according to Hollowell. He lives on the South Hill, where he purchased a HUD fixerupper at auction before getting the job.

Lately, Higgins has turned his attention to television violence, character building and personal responsibility. He and North Side school officials have organized a three-month campaign, complete with an essay contest and a play, to teach children personal responsibility.

“Are you willing to toil and sacrifice and make the path safe for the youth that follow? Are you willing to build that bridge?” he asked.

For Don Higgins, the answer is clearly yes.