SNA

Dear Neighbors,

This Saturday, September 24 we will renovate areas of the Baxt Building which have had water intrusion issues. This work will require us to raise some staging on top of the Baxt Building roof with the utilization of a crane.
We will need to close Seventh Street from Summit Avenue to Highland Avenue temporarily in order to erect the crane. The road will be temporarily closed to ensure life safety from 8:00 a.m.- 12:00 p.m.

Should we experience heavy winds or rain, the project will be postponed to the following weekend.

We don’t anticipate that the work will be noisy or have other major impacts in the neighborhood. Please feel free to call the Neighborhood Hotline at (401)-793-4040 with any questions regarding this project.

Sincerely,
Monica Anderson
Director of Community Relations and Corporate Citizenship

The SNA yard sale will be held this Sunday, and it’s going to be a big event! Almost 50 sellers have registered to participate, and a number of Hope Street merchants will be holding sidewalk sales. In addition, the Indie Cycle truck will be parked in the CVS parking lot from 9-1, accepting electronics for recycling. (For a list of items accepted go here: http://indiecycle.blogspot.com/p/what-we-take.html)
Hard copies of this map of sale locations will be distributed from the Citizens Bank parking lot on Hope Street from 9-1 on Sunday. Hope to see you there!

Recently there has been a surge of people on the street asking passersby for money.

Some residents blame a change in law-enforcement policy while others assert that the whole situation is a scam. Many professionals link the increase to homelessness and poverty.

Learn what’s behind it.

Attend a forum from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 21, at Summit Commons, 99 Hillside Ave., on “Panhandling, Poverty and Homelessness.” It is sponsored by SNA and will be moderated by Gayle Gifford, president of Cause & Effect Inc., an advisor to nonprofits, and R.I. Rep. Aaron Regunberg.

Guest speakers include:

Diana Burdett, executive director of PICA, a private charitable nonprofit which runs the largest food pantry in the state and provides intensive case management for the homeless. She is also part of the Downtown Improvement District
;

Linda Katz, co-founder and policy director of the Economic Progress Institute;

Rabbi Alan Flam, executive director the Helen Hudson Foundation for Homeless America;

Jeffrey Dana, chief solicitor of the City of Providence (or another city representative.)

Don’t just curse the darkness, help shed some light on the problem.

https://www.facebook.com/events/331629333838011/

Some rocks had to be dug out for the posts.

Some of the posts had to be repositioned.

The new gardens portion leaves more space for kids to play.

About 10 would-be gardeners returned to the Summit Avenue park Sunday morning to resume work on the fence for the community plots, but were interrupted by a cloudburst.

Part of the day’s effort included reducing the perimeter to preserve more playground space in this initial phase of the city’s refurbishment of the entire facility.

However, about midday the sky opened, the rain poured down and the volunteer workers packed up their tools and left. Later a few returned after the sky cleared and completed most of the fencing. More work days will be scheduled to finish that job and build the raised beds for the individual gardens.

The holes, preliminarily drilled by city workers, were adjusted.

The posts were braced to be vertical.

The holes for the rails were aligned.

About twenty neighborhood volunteers on Saturday began to build the fences needed for the community gardens at the city park on Summit Avenue. The holes were dug Friday by Parks Department workers and the gardeners-to-be set the posts, adding concrete to the bases of some. On Sunday, the rails are to be inserted and concrete added to the footings of the remaining posts. Volunteers are requested to be at the park at 9 a.m. and be prepared to work until 3 p.m. Additional work days will be determined to build the raised beds for the garden plots. Some Scouts participated Saturday as part of their community service.

Now is the time to build the fences that were laid out for the community gardens in the city park at Summit Avenue and Ninth Street.

Neighborhood volunteers interested in gardening are asked to assemble in the northeast corner of the “tot lot” at 9 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 10 and work until 3 p.m. setting the fence posts into holes dug by city Parks Department workers on Friday. The next day, Sunday, Sept. 11, work will resume, if needed, at 9 a.m. and continue until 3 p.m. inserting the horizontal rails into the posts.

Participants are urged to wear work clothes as well as gloves and bring hand tools such as hammers, saws and shovels. Scrap lumber for bracing the posts will also be needed.

Future work days will be called to build the raised beds for the individual plots.

Planting is expected to be in the spring.

John Mariion, right, the executive director of Common Cause RI, is introduced by Mark Tracy, the coordinator of SNA’s lecture series, Wednesday in Summit Commons.

“The real key” to making government work properly, says John Marion, the executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, is for “people to take advantage of the right to participate.”

Speaking to about 15 Summit residents Wednesday evening at the second in SNA’s lecture series, Marion said, “We can build institutions, but who is going to take advantage of them?” His topic was “How do we hold power accountable?” and was followed by a question-and-answer period.

He said citizens must become “active visitors” at meetings of governmental bodies and “have to file complaints” to make laws effective and figure out how to enforce them. He cited the history of Common Cause, which was formed nationally in the 1970s as a “people’s lobby” and worked in Rhode Island during the 1980s on the separation of powers in state government.

Marion, who lives on the East Side “near the observatory,” said citizens hold legislators accountable at election time but also must monitor “how they hold the public trust between elections.” Unfortunately, he noted, the district has been represented by people who abused that trust.

He urged voters to support the proposals on the November ballot to modernize elections in the state. “One of the broken institutions in Rhode Island is the Board of Elections,” Marion said, that “wants to run elections the way they always have.” He pointed out that there is state ethics commission, but that the R.I. Supreme Court ruled that the commission doesn’t have jurisdiction over legislators. He said Common Cause was working to get that power back to the panel and urged his listeners to support that effort.

In answer to a question, Marion said that a constitutional convention is not necessary to revise election laws, but can be accomplished by ballot questions.

He closed by pointing out that in such a small state, “government is readily accessible and citizens can take advantage of that.”

Marion joined Common Cause in 2008, and is its chief lobbyist and spokesperson in Rhode Island. Before that, he was a graduate student in political science at Indiana University and taught and wrote extensively on American politics and public policy. He received a bachelor’s degree in political science and history from Binghamton University where he met his wife, Karen Ng. They have twin daughters and are “very much members of the community for the long term.”

Long-time SNA board member Sheila Perlow speaks at the rededication of the Henry Bowen Anthony Fountain in Lippitt Park in 2011. She pointed out that she and the fountain were the same age.

Sheila Beth Perlow, who died July 26 at age 75, was a passionate supporter of the Summit Neighborhood Association and served on its board of directors for almost a decade.

She grew up in a house on Lafayette Street in Pawtucket that her family had owned for years, moved away for a while and then came back in the 1990s. She acknowledged that technically she didn’t live in Providence’s East Side, but “I could see Summit from my kitchen window.”

“She loved it over there,” said her daughter, Jill Stewart, adding that Sheila “loved to care for people,” and did so for 30 years in her admitting job in the emergency room at the Miriam Hospital.

Sheila “was genuine all day long, good or bad,” said her daughter.

Dean Weinberg, president of SNA, wrote:

“The passing of Sheila Perlow is a profound loss for SNA and for the neighborhood in general.  I’m not even sure how long she’d been involved in the neighborhood association, but it’s been years.  She has been a key component of brokering the peace between our residents and our institutional neighbor, the Miriam Hospital.  She did this quietly and naturally.

“From my experience with Sheila, that’s the only thing she did quietly.  Those that knew her will agree that she had a fun and outgoing personality.  She never held her tongue, in a good way.  She spoke her mind and let you know what she thought.  And she was funny while she did that.  I always appreciated not just her perspective on a topic, but the often-hysterical quips she would slide in there for your enjoyment.

“I also appreciated that she would often call me after a meeting, either to agree with the outcome or to express her concern.  I’ll miss her raspy voice expressing to me her opinion on something, dropping F-bombs left and right, not mad or excited, but just talking it out.  I loved that.  She was so honest and easy to communicate with.

“Sheila was incredibly dedicated to the Summit Neighborhood Association.  Even though she lived just over the Pawtucket line, she was always, always, always the first to volunteer to help out.  She took the fun jobs and the not-so-fun jobs, it didn’t matter to her.  She was of-service.  The organization has suffered a huge loss with her passing.

“Our sincere condolences go out to her family, including her partner Dan MacLellan, another long-time dedicated SNA board member,” Weinberg wrote.

Last year, Sheila suggested that SNA annually recognize someone in the neighborhood who quietly and behind the scenes contributed to boosting the quality of life in Summit. In honor of her commitment to the organization, the neighborhood and the people in it, the SNA board of directors is moving to authorize the Sheila B. Perlow Community Service Award to be awarded annually based on nominations from the neighborhood.