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News
The Raw Deal
by Fran Quigley
Mar 5, 2003

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Changing the World 101
by Fran Quigley
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Letting the terrorists win
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Show Previews
The Acorn, Christian Taylor
by Scott Shoger
Apr 23, 2008

An ACORN of activism germinates
by Fran Quigley Aug 13, 2003

Public Interest

There are 21 neighbors, two organizers, one reporter and one city official all sitting in the front yard of Melinda Shepherd’s Worth Street home on the city’s far-Westside. Fortunately, it hasn’t rained recently. If it had, where we sit would be under water. Which is what we are here to talk about.

From Left, Indianapolis ACORN organizer Kate Van Winkle joins Westside residents Melinda Shepherd and Charles Appleman at a recent neighborhood meeting.

This working-class neighborhood has narrow streets, no sidewalks and no storm sewers. Sandbags are piled against Melinda Shepherd’s garage, and she passes around photos of the damage flooding has done, despite the use of four sump pumps, to the inside of her home. Another photo shows a duck swimming in the front yard. The gathered neighbors exchange a series of flooding horror stories, some amusing, some disgusting: kids playing with remote controlled boats in the street, snakes swimming into the house and under the bed, ruined floors and walls. “My son is asthmatic,” Shepherd says. “When there’s flooding, there is mold and mildew, which makes it hard for him to breathe. And don’t get me started on the mosquitoes!” This neighborhood needs storm sewers. The residents have called the Mayor’s Action Center, TV stations and even had a city engineer come out and take a look. Yep, he agreed, they need storm sewers all right. But there’s no money to install them. So the neighbors are turning to ACORN. With 600 chapters across the country, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is the nation’s largest community organization of low- and moderate-income families. In 45 U.S. cities, ACORN has successfully taken on politicians and predatory lenders, slumlords and school boards. But this is the first time they have taken on Indianapolis. ACORN is here because Kate Van Winkle, a 27-year-old Indianapolis native and recent law school graduate, returned from New York City when she saw the need for community organizing in her hometown. “For a lot of my friends, coming back here was the absolute last thing they wanted to do,” Van Winkle says. “But I realized that if I really wanted to be authentic about social change, I needed to go home to do it.” When she worked at Indiana Legal Services and for Horizon House, Van Winkle saw the effects of predatory lending and found the lack of remedies for cheated homeowners “maddening.” She did some research and discovered ACORN was aggressively opposing predatory lending throughout the country. “I contacted ACORN and asked why aren’t they doing something like that in Indianapolis,” she says. Soon enough, Van Winkle was being trained to open an Indianapolis chapter. In the spirit of the Organization for a New Eastside (“ONE Powerful Neighbor,” March 26), who Van Winkle consults with, ACORN is helping empower residents who have received the brush-off when it comes to city services. Now these Westside neighbors are convening meetings and demanding answers from city officials like Wayne Township administrator Neva Hagedorn, who has agreed to come to Melinda Shepherd’s home. “This is the worst flooding I have ever seen,” Hagedorn says, looking at a series of photos. “I must say that I have never driven through this area after a rain.” She promises to have someone clean out the drainage ditches, but doesn’t offer any timetable on storm sewers. Lots of other neighborhoods need storm sewers, too, Hagedorn says. But if storm sewers don’t come here soon, these new ACORN members are poised to cause the kind of scene that is uncommon in the polite tradition of Indianapolis advocacy. Already these neighbors have invited media, brandished signs (“Fix the Ditch”) and hauled full sandbags to a “crash-in” on the Ben Davis Water Conservancy that serves the area. They also appeared uninvited at the local assessor’s office to register very loud concerns about their property tax assessments. “We don’t have six-digit incomes, but we care about our community,” Shepherd says. “We want to know why we don’t get services that richer neighborhoods do.” Her front yard may be soggy, but her logic seems quite solid. For more information on ACORN, call 317-635-6277, or check www.acorn.org. Death of an activist Speaking of neighborhood activists, Indianapolis lost an important one last week. Lawrence Washington, former ONE president and, along with his wife Sandy, the cover subject of our issue on predatory lending (“Bad Loans and Broken Dreams,” July 17, 2002), passed away at age 69 after suffering a stroke. A U.S. Army veteran and former G.C. Murphy and Naval Avionics employee, Lawrence left behind Sandy, a son, Lawrence Jr., and two daughters, Mattie Therese Kimball and Norma Truslar, along with a brother, five sisters, three grandchildren, one great-grandson and some 14 godchildren. There are a lot of injustices that go unaddressed because the victims don’t want to publicly call attention to themselves. For example, it is embarrassing to admit to being ripped off by predatory lenders. But Lawrence and Sandy Washington were willing to talk about their case, and also to stand in front of their home for a photo to be placed on 50,000-plus copies of NUVO. Later, the Washingtons honored several requests to testify about predatory lending at town hall meetings and at the Indiana General Assembly. When Lawrence passed, he and Sandy were on the verge of a favorable settlement of Bank One’s foreclosure lawsuit against them, and had even found some help making much-needed improvements to their Hamilton Street home. Lawrence left their house, and our hometown, in better shape than he found it.

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