December 2, 2004
Diers and Educational Partnerships office help communities help themselves
Last spring, the children of Toppenish were asked what they wanted to liven up their city park. So they thought it over, drew some pictures and decided they wanted a big dragon.
Well OK, but who had dragon-makings?
The residents themselves did, it turns out. And Jim Diers — community organizer, former director of neighborhoods for the City of Seattle and now Community Liaison in Educational Partnerships and Learning Technologies at the UW as well as a published author — helped them move the idea from dream to dragony reality.
Also an affiliate professor in the UW’s Department of Architecture, Diers was in Toppenish with students from his Community-Driven Development class, who represented several departments, as a part of a project developed by the UW-Yakima Valley Community Partnership.
The town’s Lincoln Park had a long history of gang activity and spray paint tagging, and residents there wanted it cleaned up and improved.
A team of his students from the Evans School learned what dragon-building materials were available by conducting “asset mapping,” Diers said, the process of discovering and listing a community’s talents and resources rather than its deficits. They learned that one local knew how to build with straw bales while another worked with stucco. In all, there were skills aplenty for recreational dragon making.
Diers also used the talents of his students. Students from landscape architecture created a conceptual plan for the park based on the neighbors’ ideas, and architecture students worked with former UW Professor Sergio Palleroni to design a straw bale dragon.
“Because it was the kids’ dream,” Diers said, “they raised $1,200 in pennies to help pay for the dragon.” The children and their parents also helped build it last June. The resulting 50-foot dragon wraps its serpentine self around new play equipment that the community and UW students installed three months later.
And that’s what Diers likes best — helping neighborhoods and communities work together to achieve their goals. And it’s also the subject of his book, called Neighbor Power, just published by University Press. Diers, 51, is at the start of a round of appearances to promote the book, on the UW campus and throughout the Seattle area. The book, he said, is about “why government should see active citizens as an asset rather than a threat.” In it, he tells of his days with the city and includes many stories of excellent work done at the neighborhood level.
“There can be real value in empowering communities,” Diers said. “There’s a lot of knowledge, skills and resources that you’re otherwise missing out on. And there’s more ownership.”
In fact, it all boils down to what is practically a mantra with Diers: “Never do for the people what they can do for themselves.”
The Canadian-born son of a Lutheran minister and professor, Diers said he learned basic values about justice and community service from his parents. As a high school student in Iowa and California, he was active in protesting against the war in Vietnam.
After graduating from Grinnell College in Iowa, he and his wife, Sarah Driggs, came to Seattle in 1976 with little knowledge of the area other than its enticing green and blue shapes on the map. His first jobs were humble indeed — he cleaned restrooms at the Kingdome on its opening night and later spent two weeks setting up panty hose displays in stores before becoming a community organizer, which led to a better-paying job with Group Health in 1981.
At Group Health, he worked to get members active in the governance of the cooperative. In 1988, then-Mayor Charles Royer hired Diers as the first director of the new Office of Neighborhoods.
A bit surprised to see his office and role continue to grow through the Royer and then the Rice and Schell mayoral administrations, Diers had a successful run as director of neighborhoods until he was, somewhat famously, dismissed in 2001 by Mayor Greg Nickels. The firing sparked a public show of support from his friends and supporters throughout the area. Diers said he’s grateful for the 14 years he spent at the city. Tongue only slightly in cheek, he also credited Nickels for giving him the time to write his book.
But the city’s loss, it seems, is becoming the University’s gain. Diers’ work life remains extremely busy. Outside the UW, he is executive director of the South Downtown Foundation, serving the Duwamish, International District and Pioneer Square. He also is a research associate for the Department of Architecture — the work that first took him to Toppenish. His main current role, however, is that of community liaison for Educational Partnerships and Learning Technologies Department, in Vice Provost Louis Fox’s office. Simply put, the program looks to expand the University’s cooperation with diverse communities across the state for their mutual benefit.
Diers was recruited for that job by Christine Goodheart, the director of Educational Partnerships and Learning Technologies. His job is to replicate in Seattle neighborhoods the partnership model successfully developed by his co-workers in rural communities such as Toppenish. He seemed the perfect fit, Goodheart said.
“He just has tremendous knowledge of the neighborhoods in Seattle — he’s worked with them for over 20 years — and has a great sense of how to organize within communities around the issues that are most important to community members,” Goodheart said. “In his role with the city he used all kinds of strategies, some of them very new and innovative, to link resources of the city with specific needs of neighborhoods, and to help neighborhoods with their own development.”
His current role with Educational Partnerships focuses on three southwest Seattle neighborhoods — Delridge, South Park and White Center. He is getting UW faculty and staff together with community leaders to see what improvements can be made in those areas, with the UW’s help. Diers notes that the intent is to find the nexus between community priorities and UW needs for research and teaching.
It’s all about thinking of people as partners with whom good works are done, rather than just as customers to be counted or served.
“I get great energy from the community,” Diers said. “I just take tremendous joy in seeing people building something, in seeing communities help each other. They’re volunteers, and they pour their lives into it,” he said with feeling.
And what of the dragon in Toppenish’s Lincoln Park?
The children helped paint it with colorful hand-prints — the idea of an enterprising UW student of Diers’ — and the graffitti and tagging no longer seem to be a problem.
“It looks great. No one has touched it,” Diers said. “And now there is something to bring them into the park. The kids say, ‘Oh, the Dragon Park. That’s where we go to play.”
Jim Diers’ Neighbor Power book appearances:
- Friday, Dec. 3, 8 p.m., Bookworm Exchange, 4860 Rainier Ave. South, Seattle.
- Monday, Dec. 6, noon, Northwest Center for Livable Communities, Court of Gould Hall, Univ. Way NE and NE 40th St., Seattle.
- Monday, Dec. 6, 7:30 p.m., Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave., Seattle.
- Thursday, Jan. 13, 2005, 7 p.m., Third Place Books, 17171 Bothell Way NE., Lake Forest Park.
- Thursday, Jan. 20, 7 p.m., Parrington Hall, UW.
- Thursday, Feb. 3, 7:30 p.m., Ravenna Third Place Books, 6504 20th Ave. NE, Seattle.
- Friday, Feb. 11, 7 p.m., Chief Sealth High School, 2600 Thistle, Seattle.
About Educational Partnerships and Learning Technologies: Educational Partnerships and Learning Technologies (EP & LT), led by Vice Provost Louis Fox, was established in 1998 to ensure that the broadest range of communities have access to University research and education expertise; to forge reciprocal relationships between the University and diverse communities; and to create new opportunities for community-based research and learning for students and faculty.
Guided by a campus advisory committee made up of more than 80 faculty and staff, EP & LT creates a permanent presence for the UW in rural regions of the state and works with faculty and community members to develop a wide array of projects, working especially closely with tribes and with minority communities. Partnership offices in three rural regions are led by a recognized community leader; affiliated with one or more local partner institutions, including a local institution of higher education; and guided by a Community Advisory Committee. Jim Diers joins a team, led by Christine Goodheart, executive director of University-Community Partnership, dedicated to this work.
- UW-Yakima Valley Community Partnership is led by Robert Ozuna and Ricardo Valdez and is based at Heritage University. Current projects include neighborhood revitalization with the College of Architecture and small business development with the School of Business.
- The UW-Northwestern Olympic Peninsula Partnership is based at Peninsula College in Forks. Community organizations and tribes are working with the UW Libraries and Department of History to create an online virtual museum to display the history and culture of the area in the Community Museum Project, led by Larry Burtress.
- The UW-Okanogan Region Community Partnership focuses on economic development and technology and is led by recognized community and tribal leader, Terry Knapton. Nancy “Lynn” Palmanteer-Holder, former Director of the UW-Okanogan Region Community Partnership and a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Indian Reservation, continues to assist EP & LT in developing partnerships with tribal communities.
Also committed to showcasing University-community partnership across campus, EP & LT developed a case study series to spotlight the ways in which departments across campus connect work with communities into their teaching and research interests. Case studies are developed by writer and researcher Ken Symes.
