As the Flint water crisis drags on, a LISC AmeriCorps staffer and Flint native reflects on the importance of cultivating effective, grassroots leaders to guide the city back to health and stability.
I remember exactly when the water went bad. It was a summer day in 2014, and I was washing my hands at work, at the Genesee County Land Bank where I served as a LISC AmeriCorps member. When I turned on the tap, the water that poured out was a sickly yellow and smelled like a dirty fish tank. Within a few days, my hands were covered with a rash.
It didn’t take long to see how the tainted water was yet another casualty of funding cuts by emergency managers appointed to run my home town: in the previous two years, I had been laid off three times from a job in Flint’s office of blight elimination as those managers played fast and loose with the city budget. But the polluted water, which has exposed countless children to lead contamination and jeopardized the health and wellbeing of every Flint resident, was by far the most extreme evidence of the city’s decline.
The story of Flint’s water crisis may be well known by now—just last week, felony charges brought against three officials involved in the debacle made national headlines—but it continues to raise questions that the media doesn’t necessarily ask. How, for instance, can we make sure nothing like this ever happens again? There’s no doubt in my mind that the city would not have been exposed to tainted water if ordinary Flint citizens had an ongoing role in the city's leadership. Or if their early warning cries about the water crisis had been heeded. For those of us in community development, the water disaster pushes us to think about how to make local voices and homegrown leadership stronger, louder, more skillful.
What I have come to realize through my experience with LISC AmeriCorps is that it’s ordinary residents who can make the difference for Flint—and all the other places like Flint—if they have the right training and resources. In my hometown, we sometimes say we’re a bunch of “three-day groaners”: complain the first day, picket the second, and by the third, we’ve given up and gone home. I get that. Flint’s problems have endured for so long that efforts to turn things around can seem futile. There are jobs to do and kids to feed. But LISC works to support the people on the front lines of community change, so that burnout doesn’t end up crippling their efforts.
It’s easy to see that AmeriCorps members are local leaders in the making; we serve because we can’t sit by and watch our communities crumble. At our national leadership conference earlier this Spring, I wasn’t surprised to hear that Flint AmeriCorps members are working—during their off-hours—to help with the water crisis (I also wasn’t surprised that the first thing they did after arriving at our conference hotel by the sea in Newport, RI, was to take a 45-minute shower!)
Take DeWaun Robinson: On weekdays, he does his AmeriCorps service with the Genesee County branch of Habitat for Humanity. But on weekends, he manages water drives and plastic bottle collections and educates people about the importance of recycling (all the bottled water has left Flint clogged with discarded plastic). Renee Harvey volunteers delivering water to elderly Flint residents and other people who can’t make the trip or lug gallon jugs home from the distribution center.
For my part, when I’m not at work I’ve been researching ways to distribute $21 shower filters to households so families don’t have to spend an hour boiling enough water to get clean. Or how to promote the consumption of iron-rich foods that help absorb lead from the blood stream. These are stop-gap measures, I know, but they could help while the city and state sort out how to address Flint’s corroded infrastructure.
Not only does LISC AmeriCorps train people to be effective community developers, it has kept many of us on the path of service, when we might otherwise have fallen off. After my third lay-off by the City, where I had helped manage the demolition of condemned properties, I got a job working at Victoria’s Secret. A co-worker there told me about AmeriCorps. That tip was a blessing: through my service with the Land Bank, I helped people figure out what to do with the empty spaces left behind after demolition. Parks, community gardens and other kinds of public spaces are beginning to flower where condemned buildings once invited crime and cast a shadow of desolation over neighborhoods.
Of course, the water crisis has thrown a gigantic wrench into what progress Flint has made in recent years, but progress has a way of finding other outlets. Blight is being eliminated; a new farmer’s market has opened downtown, and there’s talk of new grocery stores and investment. For the first time in half a century, we have a masterplan to map out the city’s renewal. People who were never active before have stepped up to volunteer—to help people like my mother, who every day after work has to figure out how to get enough bottled water for her family. I am sure that it is volunteers like these, and committed people like my LISC AmeriCorps colleagues, who will someday make Flint a safe and healthy place to live again.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brittany Baker, AmeriCorps Assistant, LISC Americorps
Brittany, a native of Flint, MI, is an assistant with LISC’s New York-based AmeriCorps program. Before becoming a staffer, she served for two years in LISC’s AmeriCorps program at the Genesee County Land Bank. Brittany is currently pursuing her bachelor’s in social work.