Community led strategy meeting for South Bend’s West side

SOUTH BEND, Ind.  The LaSalle Park Neighborhood Alliance Association hosted a West Side Planning and Strategy meeting Thursday evening at the Western Branch Library to collaborate on the issues residents see in their neighborhoods.

Jordan Giger, co-founder of Black Lives Matter South Bend, asked the group three questions: what harms are you seeing locally, what can we [as a community] do locally to address those issues, and what do we want to build.

The group split off into small groups to discuss these questions, write down their answers, and then present them to the group.

“Over the last few months, we’ve been having conversations with community members and key stakeholders about issues that are… pressing the South Bend community, particularly the black community on the West side of South Bend, and so we decided… to host a more public conversation with residents about some of the issues and things that have been coming up,” said Giger.

Some of the issues the residents brought up were a lack of housing, worries about cuts to education, and a lack of access to affordable food after the West side Kroger on Western Ave. closed in July.

“We want to explore ways in which folks can, you know, work around these issues to address those. Obviously people have been protesting, but we need to… deploy more strategies than just protesting, we really need to build… a local agenda and work with folks at the ground level… we’ll collect the information and then eventually we’ll have a follow up session to sort of go over or have some kind of analysis of what was said and think about the next steps,” said Giger.