Jensina Hawkins: Neighborhood organizations bring our voices to local leaders

Presenter: Neighborhood Leaders Council co-Chair Jensina Hawkins spoke at the City Club Sept. 11 on the neighborhood’s role in (small-d) democratic self-governance. She is introduced by program moderator Sandra Bishop: 

Sandra Bishop: Jensina Hawkins began her healthcare career in Eugene in 2006, and in 2017 she founded a medical software consulting practice. She is nationally recognized as an expert trainer for physicians, practice managers, and staff, and she’s worked with nearly 200 medical organizations across the country.

Locally, Jensina serves with many community efforts, including Asian American Council of Oregon, Neighborhood Leaders Council, the Churchill Area Neighbors, Communities United Against Hate, Love for Lane County, and she’s on two subcommittees of the Universal Health Plan Governance Board at the state level.

She previously served on the board of Lane County Diaper Bank, the Eugene Police Commission, and the Advisory Council for Community Health Centers of Lane County. 

Presenter: Jensina Hawkins:

Jensina Hawkins: Neighborhood Leaders Council is comprised of a representative from each of the neighborhood association boards. I’m chair of Churchill Area Neighbors, and so I had started attending Neighborhood Leaders Council a couple of years ago. 

And now Jason Aulicino of South University Neighborhood Association and I chair the Neighborhood Leaders Council together.

It’s become an excellent opportunity to meet with some of our elected officials, some of the executives in the area. Hello, (LTD CEO) Jameson (Auten) in the back. I see you there.

And it’s wonderful to know a lot of the things that happen in our city. We get information to take back to our respective boards, and many times these boards, our boards, then will actually engage with those speakers as well and continue the education in our own individual communities.

One thing that’s really nice about the neighborhood associations is that because we are so hyperfocused on a specific local area of Eugene, it really gives us a lot of breadth when we talk about emergency preparedness.

For example, people living in the flat areas of Eugene, like Downtown Neighborhood Association or Whiteaker Community Council may have to deal with things like flooding or some traffic issues, possibly some of the overpopulation of the unhoused.

Up in the hills where I live off of Timberline Drive in the Churchill Area Neighbors. We are very concerned about wildfires. How do we get down off of our hill? If the forest is on fire and the roads are blocked, maybe by a fire truck or a disabled vehicle?

All of us, of course, are concerned about the Cascadia Subduction Zone. If that big one hits, what are we going to do?

So one thing about the neighborhoods is that not only do we work on preparing for emergencies, but we also provide a lot of organization for responding to disasters that sometimes have been years in the making.

For example, healthcare. If you think about when we lost our hospital in Eugene: Randy Groves, our Ward 8 city councilor, came to Churchill Area Neighbors and said he had attended a healthcare forum in Salem and wondered if we might be interested in doing the same thing.

It started out being a Churchill Area Neighbors thing, and then at one point, not understanding what I was getting into, I said, well, what if we make it citywide? And it just kind of mushroomed from there.

So we actually ended up holding a CAN citywide healthcare forum with about 200 attendees in person and another 200 online. We had live feed for some of the TV stations, and it was actually incredible what it mobilized within the legislative community.

So as a direct result of that, there’s now actually a very small medical clinic at Everyone Village in the Churchill Area Neighborhood. There’s a whole lot of awareness.

It was great for legislators to see that, yes, we’re concerned about not having a hospital. We’re concerned about not having access to primary care providers. We’re concerned about losing insurance. We’re concerned about loss of access to mental health things. And there’s a lot of things like that that I see.

I’ve actually, I’ve seen, I think about eight neighborhoods represented here today. Laurel Hill Valley has worked very hard on making sure that there’s awareness about the houses that have been sliding down off of Moon Mountain.

If anybody’s ever been to the ‘We are Bethel’ celebration, Lin Woodrich is here. And let me tell you that ‘We Are Bethel’ thing is almost entirely Lin’s brainchild. 

Somehow she manages to crank that thing out and make it look easy, and then all of us think we can do something like that. And let me tell you, it is not as easy as Lin makes it look.

With CAN, Churchill Area Neighbors, I’m actually partnering up with Southwest Hills Neighborhood Association, Amazon, I believe Laurel Hill Valley is going to be involved, and so we are focusing on things directly, like: What happens when that wildfire happens in the hills?

Most of us have trees surrounding our homes. Most of us live on very narrow streets, sometimes some very dead-end cul-de-sacs that make it very difficult to get in and out of our neighborhood for those of us that even know the neighborhood, let alone anybody who may be visiting.

And working with the city of Eugene has been fantastic on that, because we do get direct access to a lot of these questions that we have.

For example, I noticed we have our friendly independent police auditor in the audience. He’s an excellent resource sometimes when we have questions about what do we do if we feel that the police maybe aren’t responding quickly enough, or maybe if we feel that something could have been handled better.

One thing also that the neighborhood leaders do: all of those little speed radar trailer signs that you see parked off of the street sometimes that they tell you, slow down, you’re going way too fast (I’m looking at you, Demond Hawkins. But it happens to me, too. It’s okay). But all of those can be requested by your neighborhood chair.

And it’s really nice to know that sometimes a lot of people have great ideas: ‘Hey, I think we should do something in our neighborhood.’

And when you come to your neighborhood board about it, a lot of times there’s already a process in place or we know who to go to and they connect us with the people who can actually come and speak and have very knowledgeable conversations with our community about what is affecting us specifically.

If we have an issue with crosswalks next to our schools that possibly don’t have the appropriate lighting or not enough lighting, we can deal with things like that.

We can go with our city councilors and have very specific conversations about what we see in our neighborhood and how we feel about what needs to happen in our community. And the city of Eugene, the Office of Equity and Community Engagement, has been a wonderful partner for that.

Presenter: The neighborhood association also has a respected voice at the city, county, and the state. Jensina Hawkins:

Jensina Hawkins: If you have something that you’re aware of and it needs to be addressed at a city or a countywide or a state level, please include your neighborhood association leadership.

So, for example, when we talk about disasters that may or may not happen, in the Churchill-area neighborhood, there was a possibility of a data center being put into the Hynix location. 

And there’s a whole lot of organizations like Beyond Toxics and others that have organized grassroots efforts to communicate with the city of Eugene.

But I have to tell you that it’s the neighborhood association that the city comes to when it finally comes to the point of having a public hearing. The neighborhood association chair is where the city comes to set that all up.

And so if you include us in these communications and maybe we probably actually, a lot of times we don’t have the time to be fully involved in your effort because we are all volunteers. But if we are aware of what’s going on, that certainly helps us out a lot.

And if we are seeing recurring themes—imagine the recurring themes I’ve heard as chair of Churchill Area Neighbors where the data center was going to go—we can communicate these with the city as well and let the city know we can be a conduit of communication.

But just know that anytime there’s a big construction project or a development or something that the city does come to the neighborhood associations.

Presenter: Jensina took a question from the audience:

Randy Prince (Amazon): Randy Prince of the Amazon neighborhood. I personally very much support preparedness, but I have a devil’s advocate question.

Somebody in our neighborhood once told me there are real estate agents saying, ‘Yes, stop talking about that bummer stuff, like dams breaking. It’s going to drop the property values. It’s really going to hurt our community.’

‘And, you know, do we really want to bring all this out? I mean, how long ago has it been since we had a horrible earthquake? Hundreds of years. It doesn’t happen often.

‘Shouldn’t we focus on keeping things bright and sunny, and the good things about our community. After all, our insurance rates haven’t gone up like in California yet. The wildfire maps don’t show the city centers and the city’s neighborhoods as hazards.

‘Why not just keep this under wraps and encourage more people to come here, and then we’ll have prosperity and we can make our houses fireproof then.’

What do you think? How do you answer that kind of argument?

Presenter: Jensina Hawkins:

Jensina Hawkins: I’m thinking about the ice storm that we had a couple years ago, that, yes, we knew there was an ice storm coming, but I think very few of us could actually picture in our minds the enormity of what was going to happen with that.

And so we all just kind of sat around and waited for it to happen. And many of us were very ill-prepared for that.

And I’ve got to say, the strength of the neighborhood really shows in that when you know your neighbors and they are happy to help dig your car out when it gets stuck, when you know which resources the neighbors have. Some of them may have generators, some may have the ability to charge a cell phone.

And even Police Chief (Chris) Skinner and Sheriff Carl Wilkerson have both said that the number one thing that you can do to prevent crime or to get help during any sort of an emergency is to have that connection with your neighbors because they are the people who are going to be there first.

And so, Randy, to your point, we do live in an incredibly blessed community, but it is so important to know the things that we aren’t prepared for, and who are you going to go to who is prepared?

Joel Koren (City Club, member): Joel Koren, City Club member. 

I would assume that there are times that the city’s goals and the neighborhood association goals do not align. Could you give us an example of one or two of those and how the issue was resolved?

Jensina Hawkins: One example that I think everyone has heard about recently is the Amazon warehouse going out on Highway 99. The city has permitted it. There’s really no reason for the city of Eugene to have denied the permits for that. It hasn’t been a super popular thing.

But one thing that has come out of the neighborhood organizations working to really make this public is that, first of all, everyone knows that it’s going in.

About half of us could probably quote a lot of the statistics we’ve been given about how many cars, additional cars per day, how many vans are going to be entering and exiting the premises.

And one thing that really, really has been amazing about it is that there’s so much communication and education going on.

And so in Churchill Area Neighbors, if the city had said, ‘Yeah, I think this particular zone could have been used for a data center,’ we are actually working on and still planning to hold an educational forum about data centers.

It’s not so much about we hate it or we love it, or we think the city should do this, or the city should do that, but more about: What exactly is a data center? What are the actual scientific ramifications? What are the benefits that a community could reap from that?

And so I think that’s where sometimes we see some of the benefit when we have that, a little bit of that cross-culture with the city of Eugene, it’s because at the very least, we can make sure that people can help make educated decisions.

Presenter: The Neighborhood Leaders Council signed an agreement with the 4J school district. NLC co-Chair Jensina Hawkins:

Jensina Hawkins: Well, some of you in the room may have seen the tiny videographer walking around filming her mama on the stage.

That reminded me that 4J, the school district has actually signed a GNA—it’s a Good Neighbor Agreement—with Neighborhood Leaders Council, and they have committed to making sure that communication is passed to the neighborhood leaders.

So that when there are impactful things happening with the schools, maybe large events, possibly parking lot closures, things that could actually affect the entire neighborhood, 4J has committed to making sure that we know about that, and we’re able to share the information with our communities as well.

Presenter: Jensina Hawkins recommends getting involved with your neighborhood association, a recognized conduit of communication with the city, county, and state.