From the Suburbs to the City (part 2)
Eventually, Adam took a full time job with the summer camp that started it all. I still worked part time in the after-school program and part-time for my (better-paying) job in corporate America. We carried our new baby girl in a hiking backpack through Herndon Homes every weekend. I worked two jobs, juggled childcare, and read parenting blogs to try to figure out how to be the best mother to Jayci. Back then, I mostly thought my job was to keep her safe and make her happy. Adam made our own baby food and we read Bible stories out loud to her every night (apologies to our subsequent children for this lack). I joined a Mom’s morning out exercise class when her four-month-old growth spurt, refusal to sleep, and the loneliness of new motherhood threatened to drown me.
We bought superhero swim trunks at Walmart and taught the boys to swim in our neighborhood pool in the suburbs. Zack would cling to me while I sputtered under his nine-year-old weight and explained I wasn't the strongest swimmer myself. We ate pizza poolside, licking grease from our wrinkled fingers. They splashed Jayci in the baby pool, pushed her stroller with towels draped across their shoulders, and sneaked her bites of their ice cream despite our protests that sugar wasn’t good for her. We picked them up for her first birthday party, where they worked on teaching her how to walk at the pinterest-perfect party complete with pink tutus and cake pops and no one else who looks like them.
At some point, I noticed that I didn’t really know the names of our next-door neighbors, whom I only occasionally waved to over our privacy fence or saw before pulling into our garage. Meanwhile, downtown in Herndon Homes we watched a family we knew get evicted, only to be immediately welcomed into the apartment next door, two bedrooms and two mamas with eight children between them. Adam started wondering aloud if it would be possible for us to move into the housing project ourselves. I dismissed his questioning with a laugh, comfortable our three-bedroom two-story home in the suburbs forty-five minutes north.
Soon, though, our life felt increasingly divided. I found myself rubbing up against the sharp contrasts of our life in the suburbs and our time in the city. The boys came to our house, and we spent time inside their apartments, growing in understanding that the differences between the two were both more and less than we first imagined. We stayed present long enough to listen and learn, and build real relationships, we experienced a shift in the views inherent in our upbringing. We started reading our Bible with a new understanding of verses like “love your neighbor” and “blessed are the poor,” because knowing people changed things. Our perspective shifted imperceptibly and then widely, as we encountered Jesus in the face of two boys who had already overcome more difficulties in ten years of life than we had in our twenty-four. Proximity to pain and poverty changed our perspective and transformed our hearts. Suddenly, Adam sounded less crazy when he suggested moving closer to the boys. In fact, we eventually decided together we could no longer live in the tension of truly caring about the boys and their community, and then driving back home across the dividing lines of the city into the relative ease of our homogenous life in the suburbs. We decided, with altruistic if naive vision, to become not just figurative neighbors but literal ones.
Over those years, we learned the value of deep over wide. We discovered that the more we walked with people in relationships instead of merely programs, the more we were ourselves transformed. We also discovered the often-dark and unrelenting depths of the systems and obstacles the boys and their families faced. We encountered the criminal justice system in new ways and discovered how racism was still alive and well. We learned about education reform. The voucher system was confusing, landlords could be cruel. The needs, quite honestly, felt overwhelming. Going deep, we discovered, was the only way we could make a difference while being ourselves truly changed in the process. We decided, then, that we wanted to do something different. Something that went deep instead of wide, something that offered more people a chance to connect with kids and families in the city.
We developed a new habit of driving through neighborhoods near where the boys moved, trolling real estate listings, and eagerly scribbling down the addresses of houses we thought looked promising. We eventually landed in Adair Park, a charming neighborhood on the Southwest side of Atlanta with old bungalows in need of some serious TLC. Wide streets, green spaces, and cute historic details endeared my design sensibilities to the neighborhood, and we were both drawn to an overgrown corner lot with a crooked For Sale sign in the yard and a few people gathered on the front porch to smoke.
Cobbling together a board of directors, fumbling through setting up something new, dedicated to a vision for mutual transformation, we started Blueprint 58. We put an offer on that brick house on the corner, and committed ourselves to the neighborhood around it. We knew we wanted to build relationships, to somehow bridge gaps and listen to the neighborhood’s needs. We were excited, adventurous, still fairly naive but trying earnestly to listen and learn. Blueprint 58 was born as I grew our second child in my belly.
From the beginning, our goal with Blueprint 58 was to transform our community from the inside-out rather than the outside-in. Having learned from programs we didn’t necessarily want to replicate, we discovered our own prideful assumptions, and once again learned a lot. We finally discovered that we didn’t actually know very much, and arguably we still don’t. But we did know that we wanted to build a nonprofit that reflected the Blueprint set forth in Isaiah 58. To us, this meant recognizing and striving to restore the inherent dignity and assets already alive in our new neighborhood. We wanted to always approach our ministry humbly, as servants and learners who simply desire to create a safe space where neighbors can flourish in who God has made them to be. Our hope was that Blueprint 58 would exist to connect neighbors and friends and broaden horizons on both sides of the relationship. We knew from experience that crossing boundaries of race and class and history and culture could create a more beautiful tomorrow for each and every one of us. We also knew that this would start with moving in. With sticking around long enough to connect and learn and to find ourselves in solidarity with our neighbors.
