Why neighborhood rebirth matters to Deere, QC business community

John Deere is increasingly making the sustainable revitalization of diverse neighborhoods including Rock Island’s West End and Moline’s Floreciente neighborhood its business. And the Moline-based global equipment manufacturer is not alone in supporting both Floreciente’s successful Mercado on Fifth story and the one now being written in Rock Island’s West End.  Among them is Quad […]

John Deere is increasingly making the sustainable revitalization of diverse neighborhoods including Rock Island’s West End and Moline’s Floreciente neighborhood its business. And the Moline-based global equipment manufacturer is not alone in supporting both Floreciente’s successful Mercado on Fifth story and the one now being written in Rock Island’s West End.  Among them is Quad Cities Chamber CEO LaDrina Wilson. “The vibrancy of the West End of Rock Island of the ‘70s is lost on the present generation,” she said. “We’ve gone an entire generation without a lot of investment in this area and I’m glad to see public and private partnerships happening at a grassroots level to support the advancement of this neighborhood.”

Ms. Wilson added: “Communities that focus on inclusive economies are communities that win. The chamber supports the advancement of entrepreneurship and localized efforts that center on appropriate representation of the community members that live in and have grown up on the West End. This is important work and we stand ready to complement any efforts that result from this study.” The area also boasts nearby corporate neighbors, including Crawford Co., that support the process.  “While our location on Mill Street is outside of the revitalization zone, Crawford and our employees would certainly feel the positive impact of this effort,” company owner Ian Frink told the QCBJ. “We hope with this effort to see businesses, large and small, prosper in downtown Rock Island.” “More places to do business, shop and eat are all benefits for our company, and specifically our employees,” he added. “It also impacts those of our employees that live in Rock Island. We also like the plan to beautify the area, and make certain areas more pedestrian friendly. By creating more accessible attractions, we hope to see more visitors to Rock Island, and the downtown corridor.”  When neighborhoods succeed, the region benefits, said Visit Quad Cities President and CEO Dave Herrell. “Neighborhoods within the Quad Cities region are what help us stand out from an authenticity perspective,” he said. “Our Tourism Master Plan contemplates fostering neighborhood personality, character, and identity to generate more diverse and clustered cultural products. Rock Island has an incredible opportunity to activate and leverage the West End revitalization to create more value for residents and area businesses.” So far, the ongoing West End effort has received $150,000 over two years from John Deere and is expected to get another $65,000 boost, according to Nate Clark, president of the John Deere Foundation, Deere & Co.’s philanthropic arm.

That funding is critical to helping to ensure that the West End plan succeeds, local organizers say. Take Lynda Sargent, a member of the steering committee seeking to turn around the area. She told the QCBJ, “If John Deere is on board with our city leadership to make this happen, I believe it will happen.” Her “heart leapt,” she added, when she first heard that Deere had asked the two key questions which ultimately launched the current community-based approach to the west-end planning effort: “Are you dreaming BIG enough,” and “Do you have the right people in the community engaged to make it happen?” John Deere has worked for years to help lift up global partner communities, but even before COVID-19 hit, Mr. Clark said it realized that across the region “there were cities and especially neighborhoods that had been sort of left behind. What I mean by that is that from a business or philanthropic standpoint investments weren’t being made in those parts of the region.” “We all know where they are,” he added. “We all know where poverty strikes families the hardest. We know where hunger strikes families, where there are barriers to success.” As the company began to look locally, its focus, Mr. Clark said, was to ensure with the  investments it made that “no one in our home communities is left behind.”  He pointed, for example, to the “great experience” Deere had in assisting Moline and the Global Communities nonprofit organization to boost the Floreciente neighborhood. “That was an effort on our part to bring in the experts to understand the needs of a community, and to put the community members in the lead for actually selecting the approaches they thought would be most empowering to them,” he said. That locally captained effort continues to pay dividends in this vibrant largely Hispanic economically challenged neighborhood through such things as job development, training, education and Mercado on Fifth’s outdoor summer marketplace.  Deere’s involvement in Rock Island began in 2019 when city leaders approached the Moline-based corporation seeking support for its latest effort to revitalize the West End. The pandemic and that plan’s reboot slowed progress for a time, but these days Mr. Clark is high on current progress and on the Rock Island Martin Luther King Jr. Center executive director who has shepherded the effort from the start. “I can’t say enough about the importance of Jerry Jones to this project,” Mr. Clark said. “Jerry is one of the most well respected and connected nonprofit leaders in the community, so whenever there is a project involving Jerry you know it’s going to be a good one.” Stakeholder involvement is central to Deere’s sustainable community assistance. “It is a core tenet of good, global, sustainable development that any intervention, any plan like this needs to have buy-in from the people who will ultimately own and be responsible and benefit from it,” Mr. Clark added. “You’ll often find that people will come in and they’ll identify solutions that they try to bring into the community without actually asking the community what their vision of the future is; what their hopes are,” Mr. Clark said. That’s not happening in Rock Island and as a result, he said, “I  believe that this program will be a success because it’s centered on the lives of those who live there.” It’s also important to give the project enough time so that all voices are heard, Mr. Clark said, adding “Oftentimes, we feel like there might be a silver bullet or two but that’s not the nature of sustainable development.” Broad and long experience in sustainability is another thing Mr. Clark said Deere brings to the table. “We’re a 200-year-old company essentially and we know that growth and progress and prosperity cannot be solved in a quarter or a year,” he said. “It’s something that is earned and developed over decades and in our case centuries, so we want to show our communities that we’re in it for the long haul and programs like this that allow people to have a voice and to come to the project on their terms.” He also said it’s important to replace the power dynamic when marginalized groups are concerned. “One of the worst things you can do in investment is to tell an organization that they can only spend a certain percentage to get important work done, like pay your staff,” Mr. Clark said.  “When we make investments like this it shows we want to earn the trust of organizations by investing in ways that matter,” he added. “When Jerry says that means something community-centered, stakeholder-centered, we believe him. We want to earn his trust and we want to earn the Rock Island community’s trust that we’re investing in them.” In addition to local leaders, the West End also is fortunate to have exceptional nonprofit organizations working there, he said, for example, the MLK, YMCA, YWCA, Skip-A-Long, Spring Forward, Rock Island-Milan schools and more. Mr. Clark also praised community funders and singled out the Doris & Victor Day Foundation under the direction of Tyla Sherwin-Cole. “She has helped to shine a light for other donors in the community about the importance of Rock Island,” Mr. Clark said. As a result, he said, “in addition to having great nonprofits, and an extraordinary and wonderful community you now have people who are willing in a long overdue way to invest in the community so that it isn’t left behind.”  https://quadcitiesbusiness.com/home-grown-leaders-seek-to-revive-ri-west-ends-greatness/