ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, June 13, 1996 TAG: 9606130038
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
REBUILDING Black Communities is a group without political ties or religious affiliations. It is a new civic club, sprouting in an era when participation in civic clubs generally is declining - along with citizens' sense of community, of belonging, of shared security and mutual responsibility.
Its ultimate prospects cannot now be figured. Many groups are born and wither. Still, the development of Rebuilding Black Communities is worth watching. Germinated from a seed planted by the Million Man March on Washington, its members - men and women - are nurturing a grass-roots organization of their own design in response to a shared perception of needs in the black community.
One strength is that unity of purpose. No matter what one person might think about government poverty programs - that they help or hurt, should be increased or abolished - members of Rebuilding Black Communities agree that something more is needed in neighborhoods beset by social ills: more doing. More doing something about one's own problems. More doing something for neighbors needing help.
That view has growing import as the country struggles to contain federal spending and to re-emphasize - or, in some cases, invent - local solutions to local problems. Americans of all races, religions and political stripes are trying to seek out more cost-effective measures, while reinvigorating a tradition of community activism that yields greater rewards than can be delivered by government largess.
Members of Rebuilding Black Communities say they want to turn frustration into action. In this, one of the group's biggest assets may be the spontaneous way it has grown up - a community group rooted in the community, the participants caring about and committed to that community. Their willingness to give time and talents over time will determine their success.
The fledgling group hardly has the resources to go it alone, though. Its opening Saturday of a family resource and community education center in Northwest Roanoke - in a building donated by Roanoke Tribune publisher Claudia Whitworth - will get an assist from various local nonprofit and government agencies. This community is, after all, part of a larger community.
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