Group’S Leader Ready For City’S Future

You’re going to hear a lot in 1999 about the handful of civic visionaries who made Expo ‘74 happen 25 years ago.

In those days the right combination of people with the right combination of wealth, status and connections could map out the community’s future over lunch. If that sounds a little top-heavy, don’t knock it. Look at Riverfront Park.

In a way, though, the Expo era also left another legacy. Today’s neighborhood councils, COPS shops and school site councils are heirs of the effort by Expo backers to bring nearly 200 local groups together across social and economic boundaries.

Eventually there followed neighborhood steering committees and community centers, and by the 1980s the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development considered Spokane something of a model for citizen participation in community development.

But, as Don Higgins, director of the West Central Community Center puts it, “people who had a great deal of passion for community change did not necessarily have a great depth of organizational experience.”

Four years ago the Institute for Neighborhood Leadership was created at West Central to teach primarily low-income neighborhood activists how to make their organizations work effectively.

If they lacked the Expo planners’ personal power, at least they would know enough about agenda-setting and conflict management and public speaking and consensus-building to make the most of their energy and engagement. Anyone could take the seven-week course for free.

INL almost dissolved after a year when chief honcho Marilyn Mitchell moved away, but the Northeast Community Center, with a larger staff and an energetic young Americorps Vista worker named Jeff Gombosky, stepped in and expanded INL to a community-wide offering.

Gombosky’s now a state legislator, and the institute has a different challenge in the form of abruptly dropping enrollment.

Dealing with it is a task for INL’s new director, Patrick Copeland-Malone, previously director of mission and service ministries at First Presbyterian Church. His resume so impressed INL board member Mary Gaddy that she wondered, “why would he want to work here?”

Raised in a South Hill Republican home, Copeland-Malone moved easily into politics, working effectively with both parties. But in the late ‘80s, politics was getting “nasty” and his Christian sensitivity was being stirred by the turmoil and human suffering in Central America. To his surprise, he felt himself pulled to the ministry.

“It wasn’t an easy decision for a 30-something, somewhat successful public servant,” he recalls, but his wife Connie, also in the ministry, was reassuring.

They moved to Eugene where she had a position with Young Life, then to an urban ministry in Chicago, then back to Eugene to work with a growing Latino population. Four and a half years ago, after his mother developed health problems, since overcome, the couple came home to Spokane, clueless about what their ministry would be but determined that their children would have time with grandparents.

They settled in the lower-income West Central area to stay focused on their sense of mission.

Copeland-Malone’s combination of social justice and political savvy fit nicely with the program’s purpose as described by Northeast Community Center Director Bill Dillon: “We believed if neighborhoods were really going to seek out and participate in their own destiny then their leadership needed to come from within.”

That’s the same idea behind the Spokane Office of Neighborhood Services, one of INL’s main funders. Thus Copeland-Malone and others are exploring a city-INL alliance to answer the enrollment problem.

If INL plans to tailor its offerings for a prospective audience, the city’s 23 neighborhood councils are a natural.

That arrangement would give Neighborhood Services Director Molly Myers the comfort she needs to justify city financial support of the grassroots leadership program.

But a closer link with City Hall has risks, too. If INL’s independence is diluted, its credibility in the neighborhoods could suffer.

INL graduate Jay Cousins, known as a firebrand, thinks participants need to hear from people who will tell them how neighborhoods get beat up by City Hall.

Dillon, a devoted champion of neighborhoods, is convinced no one wants to coopt INL’s independence, and Myers herself says she wants to “help, not hinder.”

The key is the new director, Copeland-Malone. Judging by his record, INL’s future and integrity are in good hands.

This sidebar appeared with the story: GET INVOLVED How to enroll For more information about the Institute for Neighborhood Leadership, call 326-9540.