Newhallville Reimagines Newhallville

More black-owned businesses. More activities for children. A praying community with a few more speed bumps and communication. That’s how more than 100 Newhallville neighbors want to see their community develop.

ConnCAT CEO Erik Clemons wants to use what he has access to — resources, influence, knowledge — to help neighbors make that vision a reality on Newhallville’s terms.

Newhallville neighbors learned about the survey conducted by a team of young summer campers and about Clemons’ idea for conducting a larger version of the survey — a ​“community opportunity wellness index” — at their monthly management team meeting held at Lincoln Bassett School Tuesday.

The survey was conducted in August by participants in a summer Kids TV camp. (Read about that here.)

After talking to people at the neighborhood National Night Out event and at voting locations during the August primaries, the campers found that the things that make most communities tight-knit and strong are what people want more of for Newhallville.

Kim Harris, a co-chair of the Newhallville Management Team, told neighbors that people in the survey asked for more communication.

“We do not really have a hub for how we communicate with each other,” she said. ​“We go out. We canvas and we do those things but we are in the process of putting a hub of management teams together so we can talk to each other.”

Gary Gates, president of the Newhallville Neighborhood Corp., pointed out a church for sale across from Lincoln Bassett School.

“It would be great for building a foundation to do something,” he said.

Harris reminded neighbors that an empty state building in the community (the former welfare office on Bassett Street) has potential but it would be up to the neighborhood to create a vision and then figure out a way to execute it — before some enterprising out-of-town developer comes to scoop it up.

“We can make it happen,” she said. ​“We’ve got to want this. We need information and lots of money.” The ​“lots of money” part drew a laugh from the crowd.

Building Bridges

Erik Clemons, who runs the arts education and worker retraining ConnCAT organization, liked what he heard. He came to the meeting Tuesday to make an offer. Not of ​“lots of money.” But access and opportunity.

“I’m in meetings every day, all day with people who have ideas in mind on what they want to see Newhallville and Dixwell look like,” he told neighbors. ​“For the most part, the people in those meetings are not from those neighborhoods they’re talking about.”

When Clemons is not busy with his work at 4 Science Park as president and CEO of ConnCAT, he said, he’s busy thinking up ways to strengthen the black community and create an infrastructure in neighborhoods that haven’t seen their fortunes rise with the rise of other parts of the city. He’s also thinking about how he can be a bridge between what he described as ​“this real issue of great wealth up the hill and poverty down the hill.”

But he’s not putting on a cape to swoop in and save Dixwell and Newhallville, he said. He’s offering to leverage his access to resources through his own organization and others like the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven and DataHaven to ​“set the table.”

He said a ​“community index” would be a data-driven mission that will provide baseline data about the two neighborhoods on health, education, employment/unemployment, housing, and the arts — all necessary to make the dream board presented by the summer campers a reality. Clemons offered ConnCAT as a place to meet and eat to facilitate the index. The real work of gathering the data lies with the community, he said.

“We can hold space while the people from the community create the index and people can create what they want to see very much like what the kids did,” he said.

Creating the index would take about a year, he said

“For me personally, I want to create opportunities in the Newhallville and Dixwell neighborhoods especially,” he said. ​“From those opportunities, there will be access because, in my opinion, opportunity means nothing without access, just like diversity means nothing without inclusion.”

Clemons told neighbors that there is a wealth gap in the country as a whole, and especially in New Haven, where for every dollar a white person makes a black person makes seven cents.

“That is how wide the wealth gap is,” he said. ​“With that, of course, is an opportunity gap.”

He called the resulting index a manifesto that will be the community’s vision for how to close those gaps.

“Especially every time someone wants to come in and develop the land in Newhallville and Dixwell and is not indigenous to the community,” he said. ​“That they have to come to see y’all and not come to see you after the plan is done and the cranes are on the ground, talk to you about what you all need and the opportunities for the people who live in this community.”

Gary Gates asked whether the index will help develop a system for providing employment or opportunities for entrepreneurship. He also said he is less concerned about Newhallville identifying as a ​“black community” especially as more people of other races move in. He said he wasn’t knocking what Clemons offered; he was just skeptical that it might be better to focus on one issue like employment and entrepreneurship.

“I want to empower people,” he said. ​“And I accept that we’re a mixed community at this point.”

Shirley Lawrence told Clemons that any skepticism is because the community has been ​“studied and surveyed to death.” But the fruits of that data collection don’t benefit the neighborhood, she said.

Clemons said he understood. ​“This is how I can help create the table,” he said.