Summit Lake would be a pinpoint on a map of the world, but it’s played a central role in the life and livelihood of Akron, Ohio.
About 40 miles south of Lake Erie, which is a thousand times bigger, Summit Lake has known many uses in an Ohio city once famed as a global center for manufacturing rubber. The lake has been a source of water for early settlers, a resting point for boats traveling the Ohio and Erie Canal, a popular recreation spot for local beachgoers and amusement seekers, and, less happily for its once-clear waters, a dumping ground for the rubber factories that used to line its shore.
The fate of Summit Lake has risen and fallen with the fortunes of Akron itself.
From 1960 to 2010, the city’s population fell from 290,000 to 199,000, and poverty swelled. As of 2016, more than a quarter of Akron’s residents lived below the poverty line. Factories shuttered, people moved, and the lake became known for murky waters and rumors of crocodile monsters and dumped tires. The neighboring community, also named Summit Lake, lost more than half its population and saw its poverty rate more than double from 1970 to 2010.
The story of Summit Lake is mirrored in many communities across the United States, and its effects run deeper than the population and poverty numbers reveal.
As income inequality has deepened, economic research shows that people in cities have clustered into neighborhoods segregated by income, reducing our interactions with those whose backgrounds differ from our own. At the same time, social-science research tells us we are now less likely to spend time or interact even with the people who live near us. Technology and the privatization of what once was public — gyms, pools, libraries, even parks — have further isolated us into separate digital and physical spaces.
High-quality public places have the potential to bring people and communities together. But at exactly the time we need philanthropists to be investing in them, we have let our parks, libraries, community centers, and public pools fall into disrepair. In the four years following the Great Recession, funding for local parks fell by 21 percent, according to the National Recreation and Park Association.
This matters for people in Akron and nationwide. When the water is left polluted and the lakefront overgrown and littered with trash, people are more likely to stay away. From an environmental standpoint, these natural amenities can no longer deliver benefits like enhancing human health and well-being and helping cities adapt to climate change.
More important, if a neighborhood looks and feels abandoned, the people who need or care about preserving these places are less likely to believe that their voices matter or that they can make a difference. This belief is fundamental to a functioning democracy and to universal human rights. It’s something that we as philanthropists must strive to maintain for all, no matter what our cause — protecting the environment, promoting the arts, or advancing education.
A Lakefront Path to Human Rights
That’s why I urge everyone in philanthropy to read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948 in response to the atrocities of World War II. It was an attempt to define the essential, inalienable rights all people share — rights that, when upheld, form the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace. Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the drafting committee, composed of leaders from around the world who emphasized the right of all to participate in the cultural life of their communities.
The declaration’s decades-old guidance has played a key role in Reimagining the Civic Commons, a national project — led by The JPB Foundation, where I work, as well as the Knight, Kresge, and Rockefeller foundations — that is testing approaches in five U.S. cities.
The goal of Reimagining the Civic Commons is to reconnect people with how their communities design, manage, and operate spaces and programs involving parks, trails, libraries, community centers, and formerly obsolete buildings. Our aim is to fundamentally change the way cities and people think about these public but often forgotten places and the people who use them.
Central to Reimagining the Civic Commons is the belief that public places, when revitalized, connected, and open to all, can influence social progress, create shared prosperity, renew civic engagement, and promote both equitable participation and environmental sustainability. Multidisciplinary teams of city employees, community residents, arts organizations and other nonprofits, mission-driven developers, local donors, and urban planners are collaborating in new ways in Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, Philadelphia, and Akron.
This interconnected approach and its potential are easy to see in a visit to Akron.
At Summit Lake, the long-neglected waterfront has been transformed. Picnic tables and grills welcome neighbors for cookouts; a revitalized playground attracts local kids; neighbors give fishing lessons along the banks; and canoes and kayaks open the water to residents seeking exercise and adventure. A recently completed environmental study of the lake’s pollution levels from long-past industrial dumping found improved water quality and concludes that the lake does not pose a human health risk. As a result, I have pledged to swim across the lake with the Akron team when they are ready to do so. For now we are kayaking every Tuesday during the Farmers Market. You are welcome to join us.
Even more effective, and potentially longer-lasting than these physical upgrades, was the community-led process that led to them and the broad-based partnership behind it. Because the Summit Lake neighborhood had been cut off physically, economically, and most likely psychologically from the rest of Akron — due to the closure of a neighborhood school, the building of a highway that separated the lake from the rest of the city, and decades of disinvestment — residents were skeptical when the Akron Reimagining the Civic Commons team reached out to begin its work.
But this committed, creative team of lifelong residents, civic boosters, nonprofit leaders, parks professionals, and philanthropists worked diligently to listen to and understand the wants and needs of neighbors before embarking on any changes to the physical space.
The changes completed so far — nature-based play areas, tables and benches constructed by local youths, water activities, and a photography workshop for kids — were what residents said mattered to them, and that has built trust and momentum for bigger investments to come.
What I witnessed exemplified a basic principle among environmentalists that we are all part of the same planet. When we allow toxic chemical waste to be taken from factories and dumped someplace else, or when we import skilled people to complete local projects instead of investing in the talents of the people in our midst, we do so at the peril of the whole community’s prosperity.
We know the consequences of working in isolation and pitting one interest above that of the collective. We must stop pretending it doesn’t matter. Working to bring about a shared vision of our communities’ future may take a long time. It will require learning about one another and understanding the full history of a place and its people. But it is necessary.
A New Role for Philanthropists
With so many pressing issues before us — income inequality, racial justice, reproductive rights, clean air, clean water, climate change, and more — it might seem like philanthropic investment in building public places misses the mark in terms of making social, economic, and environmental gains. Yet to solve any problem before us, especially a big one, we must protect the free exchange of ideas among all people, especially people whose perspectives and backgrounds differ. We must relearn how connected we are to one another — that my prosperity and well-being depends on your prosperity and well-being.
In public places, discourse can flow freely, whether we’re simply taking in the world around us or playing a game of checkers with a stranger. In these trying times, public places might just be what replenish our democracy.
As philanthropists, we often work in the space where the public and the private intertwine. In so doing, we may have to be more patient with the process and fill gaps that business and government are not filling. This means more than just funding — it means ensuring that everyone has a seat at the table. Philanthropy has the opportunity to return to the fundamental ideas that should be guiding our country. Together we can protect what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights calls the “inherent dignity and ... equal and inalienable of rights of all members of the human family.”
When I was last in Akron, I sat down with residents for a celebratory dinner on the shore of Summit Lake. I ate with a boy and girl from the eponymous neighborhood. We talked about how they had built some of the tables where we were eating, discussed what may or may not be in hummus, and contemplated the future. By sitting down together, getting to know one another, we were changing each other, too — adding a new perspective, expressing our personalities, understanding what was important to each of us and why, participating in our communities’ cultural life.
This kind of shared understanding is essential for people who, until recently, were structurally left out of conversations to decide the future shape of their community.
The momentum in Akron is being built on authentic and lasting human relationships, and similar progress is being made in Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, and Philadelphia.
Together, these cities are creating value locally, and they are mutually reinforcing a way of working that combines civic engagement, socioeconomic mixing, and environmental sustainability.
This movement has broad implications for how philanthropists work toward social change in America’s cities. It’s developing new methods to create more opportunity for more people by focusing on connecting the “small places close to home” that Eleanor Roosevelt rightly identified as fundamental to the preservation of human rights and democracy.
Dana Bourland is vice president for environment at The JPB Foundation.
