This past Saturday was the opening day of the Portland Little League. It was a beautiful day from the weather to the atmosphere. A few hundred people were there watching all of the games. Mighty Oak Academy had students on every team. It was such an amazing day and it provided me with evidence of two things. Firstly, Love City is a piece of the greater Portland community. Secondly, Mighty Oak has helped build a community, not just a school.
When Shawn and I first started working on our house on Alford Avenue to prepare to move into the neighborhood, we met lots of neighbors through the process. The house we were renovating had been boarded up for close to 30 years, and we had to take it down to the studs and rebuild everything. The entire floor plan changed to make it a livable 3 bedroom house. As we were doing demo and then construction people would walk by and we would introduce ourselves. We met lots of kids just hanging out on the street looking for a place to play ball. We also met neighbors that struggled with addiction and mental health challenges. Even in the early days, before Love City even existed, we started out with the goal to just show people what love looked like. One neighbor we met was Chad.
Most who have been following Love city know the story of Shawn and Inga, husband and wife duo who moved to Portland to start loving their neighbors. Many of you have heard the story of the Essex family, who moved down a year later, James is the Chairman of the board, Nicole the school administrator, and their son Ethan the Deputy Director of Love City. What you may not know about is all the other families that are involved at Love City on a daily basis.
This year, Mighty Oak Academy has started several new after school clubs including, gardening, Dungeons and Dragons, Mighty Makers, and Threadheads. Each of these clubs is meant to introduce our students to new experiences and help them discover passions they did not know they possessed. While it is exciting watching the kids develop numerous new skills, one skill that has been particularly fun to see awakened is the creativity of the students.
We have had a lot to celebrate over the last seven years at Love City as we have seen our community grow and continue to improve. Sometimes we get caught up in the hustle and bustle of life and forget to set apart time to celebrate those around us and everything going on. The best part of being in a community is that when we are caught up in life, there are others who will come along to remind us not to forget about the things that really matter. Last week, a group of our students helped provide that reminder.
In the October of 2020, Shawn and I were looking over some assessments that some volunteer teachers had done on our then NTI students. We had opened the Mackin building up to kids in the neighborhood to come and get online during NTI when schools were closed due to the pandemic. We had 60 kids coming to the building 3 days a week. We would help them log on, and understand and complete their school work and NTI classes through JCPS. Of those 60 kids, all lived within a 2 mile radius of our building, but they went to 19 different schools across the county. We were surprised at the things we had been seeing the last couple of months with the students reading and math abilities. We of course didn’t have access to JCPS assessment results, so we decided to run some very informal assessments ourselves to see where the students were.
When we started the school year, we had done 4 weeks of training with our teachers. We had tried to prepare them as best we could to love our students, provide a safe space for them to learn and grow and in a lot of ways heal. We had hired 4 new teachers on our staff of 7 faculty as well as a new instructional coach and a behavior interventionist. We took what we had learned the previous year from working with our students and tried to build in as many supports as we could for both our teachers and our students. Even with all that preparation the first few months were pretty rocky. We doubled in student population, so in a lot of ways we were starting over, having to teach the kids how we do school, how we love one another and build trust.
Wow... this past Friday was incredible! It was the first Friday of Lent, which in the fish fry business, is like Christmas shopping season for retail stores. Everyone in Louisville it seems, whether you are Catholic or not, gets fish on Fridays, especially during lent. We were excited for this season kick off and invited a longtime friend of Love City who is also a musician to come play live music. We stayed open a little later and enjoyed the music and the neighbors coming together to eat and have fun. Unlike most church fish fry’s we are open for lunch and dinner and the lunch crowd on Friday was about the size of crowd we normally get all day, so we knew it was going to be a big day.
This past week Shawn and I took a little road trip. We flew out to North Carolina to visit some of my family and then drove back taking a tour through some states we haven’t spent much time in. We ended up in Selma Alabama, even though our original plans hadn’t been to go through there. We thought it would be worth going over the Edmund Pettus bridge where the march from Selma to Montgomery started in 1965. We looked up the best BBQ in Selma and discovered it was Lannie’s BBQ, the oldest black owned business in the state. Started in 1944 in a backyard BBQ pit that had grown into a restaurant that was frequented by celebrities, and politicians as well as locals. I was excited to see what had happened to Selma since the days of Martin Luther King Jr galvanizing the local community and how they had grown and flourished because of the sacrifice of all those people almost 60 years ago.
When Shawn and I first moved to Portland and got the Mackin building, we used to have our neighbors from the other side of town come down to help with various projects. Those first few months we had hundreds of volunteers come to help demo rooms, clean out basements and alleyways and mow grass on long vacant properties. Every time a group would come down Shawn would take them on a tour and lay out the dream. The dream always was a community empowered. Shawn would tour groups through the building and describe how we were going to have basketball games for the neighborhood, community dinners run by the community, afterschool programs, etc. All run by our neighbors empowered by resources and knowledge.
This past week I've been working on updating our website. We're excited to be able to debut this website to you over the next couple of months. My task this week has been to write all of the narrative that will appear on the website. This narrative gives an in depth view into who Love City is and how we Love. As I was thinking through the various different topics we will have on the website, a story from a few months ago came to mind. I think it's a great example of how to love your neighbor that I wanted to share.
Love City is now in it's 7th year and it's amazing what the community has accomplished during that time. Around New Years I was reflecting on the past seven years and all of the changes we have seen, all the people that we have and how the core identity of the community has deepened over time. I remembered a story from not long after Shawn and I moved to Portland that gave us a glimpse into the true heart of the community.
This past year at Love City we were focused on expanding and deepening our initiatives to develop community. We finished the 2021 - 2022 school year in May at Mighty Oak Academy and took all that we had learned to expand our staff to be able to meet the needs of not only our students but also our educators. Over the summer in the midst of summer camps and parties on the porch, we hired additional teachers, along with an instructional coach, a behavior interventionist, a chef nutritionist, and Nicole Essex, a long time member of the Love City Family left her job of 28 years with Norton Health Care and come on full time as our Head of School.
Merry Christmas!
Over the past seven years, we have witnessed many Christmas' at Love City, from our very first Christmas party in 2015 to our 2nd annual Mighty Oak Academy Christmas program a couple of weekends ago, we have seen community come together year over year in deeper and more meaningful ways.
As we look back at Christmas celebrations of the past we are thankful for all of our neighbors both near and far and how we have all come together over the years. We started with a large Christmas party for neighborhood kids in the gym at the Mackin building, giving out presents and bikes.
Ad we get ready for the Christmas break at our morning meeting at the school today we took some time to reflect on the last semester. Often when you see kids every day, you don't notice when they grow both physically and social emotionally. This past week Shawn and I got the opportunity to witness some exponential growth in one of our students and I was able to share that with the teachers this morning.
On Tuesday this week Shawn stopped by the school to encourage everyone and he ended up having a conversation with one of our now 2nd graders. Kris lives around the corner from the school on Alford about a half a block down.
One of the things that we said from the beginning when we moved to Portland and ended up starting Love City was our goal was always to build community. While it can seem like that is a very complicated undertaking, in the end it’s actually pretty simple. If you give people opportunity, resources and love and are genuine in your desire to see them live the life of abundance, community will thrive. Yesterday we had the opportunity to see community in action. Mighty Oak Academy had its 2nd annual Christmas program and lunch. This year we had 5 classes performing to a packed house full of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, neighbors, and friends.
We hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and is ready to enjoy a holiday season full of Love and Joy! Tomorrow is Giving Tuesday, and while we are thankful for our neighbors near and far and how they partner with Love City throughout the year we wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you and ask you to help spread the word about Love City.
While there are many things that Love City does as a thriving community this Giving Tuesday we are highlighting our school, Mighty Oak Academy. Our Goal is to get 25 new monthly donors of any amount to become regular partners with Love City in support of the school.
Over the past seven years Love City has had lots of events; spring carnivals, parties on the porch, Christmas parties and Thanksgiving dinners for the community. The events had multiple goals; first to build trust in the community, second to provide an opportunity to listen to our neighbors and third, for neighbors to come together and build their own community. At the beginning of Love City, we would plan the event, and volunteers would come from all over town to help run the event for the community.
Not long after we started the fish fry out of the back of the Mackin building an older couple named Tom and Pat started coming to buy fish every Friday. That was back when I worked the window taking orders and Shawn worked the fryers in the back making the fish and fries. Tom was always friendly, making small talk, asking about what we were doing with the Mackin, saying how great it was to have it back open for the neighborhood. They used to buy two fish plates and one fish sandwich. The two fish plates they wanted in one bag and the fish sandwich by itself in the another.
Way back in 2015 when we first moved to the Portland neighborhood we had no idea what the next seven years would hold for us and for the community. We moved here with pure hearts to just love our neighbors. What started out as a simple move from one side of town to the other turned into a broader community movement of love. When I opened the mail that fall of 2015 and saw the letter from the IRS officially declaring Love City Inc. a 501c3 with an effective date of November 3, 2015 stamped at the top it was the start of one of the greatest and hardest journeys of my life.
