Children's Village Vision

What we heard through our listening projects was invaluable as Hope’s plans for growth were maturing.

In the context of our listening and our growing work on the Hope Block, we began to develop what became our Children’s Village Vision.

We came to call it an agitational vision, and agitate it did, outside and inside Hope. Inside Hope we were challenged to figure out the roles of housing development and organizing (but that comes later). Outside Hope the vision challenged people’s view of what was possible.

Remember that the Hope block in the late 1980s and early 1990s was representative of the worst of the illegal activity and deterioration in Minneapolis. By the end of the 1990s we had totally transformed it. We felt really good about that, but when we visited with then-Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton about it, she said, “Your block is fine, but that is not going to make the difference. It’s not enough.” She went on, “What about those places across the street?” At the time she was getting a lot of pressure about our neighborhood, so she constantly took the opportunity to challenge us. Soon we produced the Children’s Village vision. When she saw it she was shocked. “I didn’t think you would go that far!” she said.

The Foundation of the Vision

We had started a group called the Franklin Collaborative in 1998 by going up and down Franklin Avenue (the major street that runs along the north side of the Hope Block) trying to meet owners of property and other business people. Although hardly anyone was thinking about Franklin Avenue, Kurt Schreck was. He was the mastermind behind Bruegger’s Bagels, which had its bakery on Franklin. When we told him the area could be redeveloped for housing, he said, “This area could be redeveloped for business.” It was an “Aha!” moment. We could do this! We began working to create a new neighborhood model we would later call Children’s Village.

Hope has always been resourceful at finding the players and motivating them to get together to start something new.

Children’s Village was no exception. Kurt Schreck was especially important because he understood the power of neighborhood business developments to transform an area. The Franklin Collaborative people understood the power of the Hope model and started saying: “How can we take the Hope Block model and expand the vision?” Together we pushed for a bigger picture.

As we were developing the Hope Block, we drew on volunteer work from professional architects and students who had participated in the American Institute of Architects’ Search for Shelter, an annual weekend charette focused on designing buildings for those in the business of housing the homeless.

Hope had used this resource many times. We earned a reputation for being one of the few places that actually built what was designed. Dennis Grebner, a professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota, met Hope through that process and wanted to work with Hope after he retired. He became the design architect for the Children’s Village model. Dennis brought us Brian Wessel, a trained architect who has more than 30 years’ experience in real estate development and is currently Hope’s director of development.

In 1999 Hope Community publicly introduced the Children’s Village vision for more than 16 square blocks in the area surrounding Hope.

Six-foot-high, colorful drawings showing a revitalized neighborhood with infill housing, carriage houses on the alleys, pocket parks, and playgrounds hung on our Community Room wall. A “yellow brick road” pathway connected the blocks to each other and to Peavey Park. There was a bridge over the freeway that had divided the neighborhood in the 1960s, and the drawing showed hundreds of units of housing built on the bridge.

Children’s Village was always meant to be an inspirational vision, not a development plan.

With city officials counseling us not to build on Franklin Avenue because it was a wasteland, we wanted to show another way. But the drawing included the Hope Block, declaring it a real place in the city. The reaction was strong. There were those who were ready to sign on, and others who thought we were crazy. Our challenge was to begin to make it real.