Since the beginning of Love City, summers have always been some of our busiest times. From events, to camps, to volunteer groups to summer maintenance and construction projects and now preparing for the next school year the team stays busy. This summer is no exception. We are only one month into the summer break, and we’ve already had two volunteer groups, two weeks of summer school, basketball camp and five Tuesday night community dinners. The plans for the rest of the summer don’t slow down. There are more volunteer groups scheduled, more camps, more Tuesday night parties and the water balloon fight to end all water balloon fights (Westonia Water Wars) scheduled for July.

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. 

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.