Seeds of SE Uplift Volunteer Spotlight – Benjamin Kerensa

Within a month of joining the Montavilla Neighborhood Association board in May 2013, Benjamin helped organize a neighborhood social event at the local Glisan Burger Barn. By the end of the night, the entire place was packed without a seat left and Benjamin was hooked. Since then, Benjamin has contributed to numerous neighborhood events including Montavilla’s National Night Out, a public safety workshop on forming foot patrols, and a public meeting with the DEQ regarding the crematorium on NE 80th Ave.  “Seeing positive change in the neighborhood and being involved in creating that change” fuels Benjamin’s passion for volunteering.

Before joining the board, I was working individually trying to get the Portland Bureau of Transportation and the Portland Police Bureau to be more pro-active in addressing pedestrian safety issues on NE Glisan Street. A couple of months after they did a pedestrian safety enforcement action I witnessed Heather Fitzsimmons get hit at the intersection just in front of my house. Shortly thereafter I got motivated to join the board to continue the work I was doing but on a more community basis – and it grew from there.Initially when I was trying to attack the issue as an individual and prior to Heather passing, the City said they didn’t have the funding for major changes to NE Glisan St. That changed after she passed away and the neighborhood got involved. The City ended up agreeing to improve the entire stretch of NE Glisan in our neighborhood and to install crossing improvements on NE Glisan and 78th.

We use Facebook very heavily for real time communications about important public safety issues. It allows us to share general public safety tips and information about specific public safety issues occurring in the moment. This information can then be passed along to other neighbors and to the Portland Police, helping to get the issues addressed.

Since the old website was kind of defunct everything was pushed to Facebook and the listserv, which resulted in fragmented information being shared.  So the goal of the website is to have a central location where we can share complete information and provide resources. Our plan is to post all the information to the website and then share that information to the Facebook group and the listserv. In the case of Facebook, we are going to have it somewhat automated in that whenever a new blog post is added to the website it will simultaneously be posted to the Facebook page.  The website should also help us be a little more transparent and have our meeting minutes available publically, so that people don’t have to request them – they can just download them on the spot.

What do you wish other people knew about the Montavilla Neighborhood Association?I wish more people knew that we exist and what our role is and when we have meetings. We do our best to get all that information out there but there have definitely been times when people come to a meeting and say they have lived in the neighborhood for years and just found out about us from our lawn signs. So in that respect marketing and communications are really important to grow awareness about the neighborhood association and how to get involved.

And finally, what do you hope for the future of the Montavilla neighborhood association? 

I hope that the Montavilla Neighborhood Association continues to grow and that there will be more participation by our neighbors at our meetings and in neighborhood activities, like the neighborhood clean-up. I hope we continue to engage and work towards improving our neighborhood in all the different areas including public safety, education, parks, transportation, and land-use.