By LISC, Chicago’s New Communities Program
What a neighborhood can be is largely a function of what its residents and the people who work there do. On a day-to-day basis, their actions – organizing block clubs, mentoring the children of incarcerated parents, providing shelter to homeless people, tending a neighbor’s garden – may not be heroic in the popular sense.
But those actions, and countless others like them, are what make a place what it is. And the people – the community heroes – saluted by the New Communities Program lead agencies and their partners are the ones doing the heavy lifting, often with little acknowledgement or reward.
The community heroes for Albany Park are Kompha Seth and the North Park Village Advisory Council. Congratulations to them and all of the other community heroes for their commitment to improving Chicago neighborhoods.
Kompha Seth
As a leader in the areas of affordable housing, arts and culture, education, economic development and social services, Kompha Seth has had an immeasurable impact on improving the quality of life for residents and businesses in Albany Park.
And seeing him in the Cambodian Genocide Memorial and Heritage Museum on West Lawrence Avenue, which he created in 2004, you wouldn’t think there was a time when he was penniless, friendless and unknowing of the local language and culture.
Flash back, though, to 1975, when as a 39-year-old, he arrived on Chicago’s North Side, one of two members of his extended family of 26 who escaped the killing fields of Cambodia. As he struggled to carve out a new life for himself, he became acutely aware that other newcomers to Uptown and Albany Park were confronting similar obstacles. Within five years he had established the Cambodian Association of Illinois with a part-time worker to help other Cambodians bridge the American cultural divide.
Now, with a full-time staff of 13 and 38 part-timers, he remains a critical ally of immigrants in the multi-cultural tapestry of Albany Park, and not just Cambodians. Through the Mutual Assistance Association, which he also founded, Kompha Seth has extended similar services to Bosnians, Ethiopians and others who’ve arrived here with few resources other than hope.
“I’m like a broker to bridge cultures and generations,” he said. “This is not Cambodia, it’s America. We stand for progress, development, change.”
North Park Village Advisory Council
If Chicago is indeed a city in a garden (as the urbs in horto motto suggests), then North Park Village, a 155-acre site on North Pulaski Road, can lay claim to being the garden in the city.
The grounds of former Chicago Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium now contain the city’s first nature preserve and nature study area, community gardens, a 45-acre park, affordable housing for more than 600 low-income seniors, a recycling center and an Olympics-style gymnastics center.
Managing this urban paradise is the North Park Village Advisory Council, comprising representatives from 45 civic associations, community groups and government agencies who work collectively to maintain and protect the site, addressing environmental issues, greening projects, senior resident concerns, and extending the site easement in perpetuity to protect North Park Village as a free and public use site forever. The Council was emphasizing environmental concerns and encouraging recycling long before those things were foremost in the public consciousness.
That representatives from 45 civic associations can agree on a meeting time, much less on a strategy to manage a major urban green space, is an act of heroic proportion. Yet the North Park Village Advisory Council has been doing so with splendid results for 35 years.
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