Mayor Cherelle Parker talks to the 8th District residential cleaning team as part of the Office of Clean and Green Initiatives. (Photo: Maleka Fruean)

Germantown and the surrounding eighth district neighborhoods now have their official Neighborhood Community Action Center open and staffed by the Mayor’s Office, providing municipal services directly to people in the neighborhoods they live in.

The first neighborhood community action center opened at Logan Public Library. Mayor Parker and the city are opening 11 in total, each staffed by a community manager and organizer. Now, the 8th District’s center will be in the Joseph E. Coleman library’s downstairs room.

Folks can stop by the centers for help with 311 calls and issues like abandoned cars, illegal dumping, and trash pickups. They can also talk to the staff about other quality-of-life issues in the city, and they will try to direct people to other offices and resources for solutions. 

The center will operate during the week with a community manager and community organizer. Cameron Holmes and Kenneth Day fill those roles.

Both are working to ensure that the space is what Holmes described as a “conduit through which the community members can access the resources and the services that the city provides that people often don’t have direct access to.”

The center’s hours are Monday and Tuesday, 11 a.m.- 6:30 p.m., and Wednesday through Friday, 10 a.m.- 5 p.m. It will also host community meetings, hopefully every month. 

At the grand opening in Germantown, Mayor Cherelle Parker thanked the partnership of the Parks and Recreation and Commissioner Susan Slawson, the Free Library and President Kelly Richards, Superintendent Tony Watlington, and Pastor Lonnie Herndon of the Church of Christian Compassion. 

She also honored and remembered former City Council president Joseph E. Coleman,  former State Representative David P. Richardson, and former Councilwoman Donna Reed-Miller as she thought about the history of Coleman Library. 

She acknowledged that her vision for a city government that actually showed people what they were doing needed a strong team “who were willing to go to war with the status quo, do things differently, and think differently about how we would address these problems.” These neighborhood community action centers were part of her team to help “implement the ideas, connect the dots, and actualize whatever the vision is”.

Other speakers at the grand opening included Kelly Richards, president of the Free Library of Philadelphia, and Carlton Williams, director of the Office of Clean and Green Initiatives. 

They discussed the importance of libraries and how different departments and institutions are working together to implement Mayor Parker’s vision of being the safest, cleanest, and greenest big city in the country. 

Community organizer Kenneth Day mentioned growing up and going to private school on Wayne Avenue in Germantown. 

“My idea of community, the nurturing of community, was from here. Down the street from there (his school) was Happy Hollow, where we did recess. Across the street was the bank where we deposited 50 cents every Friday. This place right here was the library that we actually used, I think every Tuesday and Wednesday, story time and different things like that. So, yeah, this idea of community, I’m all for it,” said Day. 

Germantown neighbor Shawn Hampton was at the grand opening and spoke about his process of already using the space.

In partnership with Holmes and Day, they helped him clean up an area on Penn Street that had overgrown woods and garbage, where children were walking in the street and almost getting hit by traffic. 

“I remembered I had their phone number. I called them. Listen, man, I took pictures and sent them to them. Less than 48 hours,  they was out there cleaning it up. Good looking out, [I] appreciate it. Now, people pushing their kids in strollers can walk on the sidewalk…  So, like, they really take care of what they say they’re gonna take care of. They get it done,” said Hampton. 

Holmes wants to let people know they are here to help with anything, and he invites people from the community to come to them with any problems. “My goal is that at some point we’ll have so much experience with every problem that we’ll have an answer or we’ll know something to do for every situation,” he said. 

And Day wants to ensure people know that even outside of working hours at the space, people can contact him with issues on their block and in the neighborhood.

To learn more about the Neighborhood Community Action Centers, where they will be, and what they will do, you can contact the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood and Community Engagement or stop by the open hours at Coleman Library.