Hartford’s Barbour Street comes together for cleanup: ‘The people that live here love their community’
Armed with garbage bags, gloves and trash pickers, more than 100 volunteers gathered in the North End on Saturday morning to beautify and reinvigorate their neighborhood at the Barbour Street Community Cleanup.
With the sounds of music and the smell of grilled hamburgers and hotdogs in the air, volunteers picked up trash and removed weeds across the entirety of Barbour Street, which runs from Tower Avenue to Capen Street.
“Oftentimes people drive through the North End of Hartford and they consider it a space where people don’t care. That’s not the truth. There are a lot of disparities that exist within our community. There’s challenges. There’s a lot of reasons why our community looks the way that it looks, but the people that live here love their community. And that’s what today is about,” Melinda Johnson said.
Johnson is the wife of Urban Hope Refuge Church pastor Rev. AJ Johnson, who also serves as vice chair of the Hartford Board of Education. Rev. Johnson said that he wants to see people value the North Hartford community just as much as the suburban neighborhoods that urban residents flock to. He said communitywide cleanups are a start to that mindset.
“I think it just starts with small acts of kindness like this that let people know that we can do more, we can be more and we can love more,” Johnson said. “This is one of the oldest African American neighborhoods in the state, and it’s a place that has been economically disinvested. ... There’s shootings. There’s violence. There’s all these things that will discourage people.
“And what we wanted to say today is we want to fight back with the spirit of love. And we know that when your space is clean, and you see people active and engaged, that sends a message that it’s cared for. It’s loved.”
The cleanup was a collaborative effort drawing a multigenerational group of volunteers from the Urban Hope Refuge Church, Blue Hill Civic Association, Hartford Alumni Chapter of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Inc., Hartford Communities That Care, Hartford Renaissance District, Love Your Block Hartford, Local Initiatives Support Corporation, and the Phi Delta Zeta chapter of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc.
“All these organizations show up constantly,” Johnson said. “We just wanted to pull them together and create a superhero team of people.”
Kelvin Lovejoy is the lead community organizer for the Blue Hills Civic Association, which contributed a large number of youth volunteers at Saturday’s cleanup.
“For young people today, it is extremely important for them to understand the tenants of civic engagement, the importance of civic engagement and why it is a must,” Lovejoy said. “It is necessary that you get involved in the positive development of your community. And so this is beyond schooling. This is what we call community education. And so we understand that children get reading, writing and arithmetic in school, but in community education, it’s all about raising the EQ, the emotional quotient.”
High school students Arlyse Hurn, Charisma Ceasar, Amani Bowman, Taiga Williams-Bey and Shyan Irving joined the cleanup with the Blue Hills Civic Association. They said that the cleanup made them feel like they were making a positive difference and let them know that they aren’t forgotten.
“This is home,” the teens said. “It lets us know that people still got love in their hearts for us.”
Alison Cross can be reached at across@courant.com.
