Volunteer Gives Time And Effort To Area She Loves

Breaking the poverty cycle, Cathy McGinty’s done it.

Teaching kids respect, McGinty knows what she’s talking about.

With passion, perseverance and pride, the 48-year-old mother and grandmother has helped make her neighborhood a better place to live.

“I love this neighborhood,” McGinty said of the West Central area, where she lives with her husband and two children. “It seems like a small town almost. I love the old houses and the trees.”

Her involvement in the West Central neighborhood goes back to 1975 when she was among a group of residents trying to build what is now the West Central Community Center over objections from some that it would lower property values and draw undesirables.

As a welfare mother, she wanted the center so residents like herself could give something back to the community.

“Since I was being supported by taxpayers, I wanted to give something back. We needed a place the neighborhood could gather,” she says.

Democratic Party activist Kathy Reid said she met McGinty, then Cathy Mann, when McGinty argued that some of the first community development money coming to West Central should be spent on a cooperative day care. “Not only a day care but it taught parents how to be parents,” says Reid.

Reid said many underestimate McGinty’s intelligence and skills because her focus is so much on kids.

Reid said she is impressed that someone from such a modest background with so little time can be so involved with the neighborhood.

McGinty’s latest effort is peer mediation.

Along with Don McCloskey, she helped start a West Central program that resolves neighborhood disputes without involving the police.

School District 81 and WSU Cooperative Extension helped the program with a grant and 20 students from Audubon and Holmes elementary schools have gone through mediation training.

The students recently gave a presentation to the Spokane City Council on peaceful resolution of conflict.

That program, too, came about after school administrators turned her away. McGinty went straight to the new superintendent, Gary Livingston.

McGinty, remarried since 1983, says many adults in Spokane talk to kids, but not many kids are allowed to talk back. Kids aren’t treated as equals or as even knowing what they want.

Above all, she wants to see kids able to communicate among themselves to resolve issues peacefully. Adults can help by teaching them how to do this and setting examples. Schools, she said, need peace teachers more than police officers.

All this knowledge about kids and what’s correct came to McGinty because she had an unhappy childhood, with a mentally ill mother, absent father and three disabled siblings.

“When I was a kid I could see the unhappiness and I just said to myself, ‘I’m not going to fight with my family.”’

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