Business

Q&A: She wants YOUR feedback to help ‘Rediscover Riverside’

Siris Barrios, community liaison for Renaissance Downtown Riverside Rediscovered in her office on Peconic Avenue. (Credit: Barbaraellen Koch)
Siris Barrios, community liaison for Renaissance Downtown Riverside Rediscovered in her office on Peconic Avenue. (Credit: Barbaraellen Koch)

Q: What has been your impression of Riverside so far?

A: Even though you have poor communities facing drug addiction, prostitution and crime, you also have some level of infrastructure beyond the basic service providers — more like organized leadership. So that was the part that was a little hard to find when I arrived. There are services and groups. Could there be more? I think, always.

I feel it’s a very warm community. Everyone has been very welcoming. Right now, people are trying to understand what our role is. What will we do? So I’m trying to help people digest that information.

Q: So what will you be doing with Renaissance Downtowns?

A: The approach I’m definitely going to be using is door knocking; pretty much old-school organizing. This period to November is going to be very key to connecting as many people as possible and engaging them.

And it’s not just knocking on doors and saying, “Hi! I’m here and this is what I’m doing!” but actually getting them involved in the process and helping create a vision for Riverside.

There already has been a lot of work from groups like the Flanders, Riverside, Northampton Community Association. What I intend to do is bring in folks who had been doing that work and add onto it a little bit more.

I’ll start with business groups, nonprofits and religious groups first and my goal is to get from them a couple people who might be willing to come out with me and do actual door knocking. From there, maybe we can get some house meetings where people might not be as comfortable coming into the office. Eventually we will hold a larger meeting, maybe at Phillips Avenue School. And I want to focus on some young people, ages 15 through 20, because this project impacts their future. They’re going to see this development and benefit from it as well.

I’ll be gathering information and ideas and once we have some key ideas that are sticking, we start refining those ideas. Then we’ll have a campaign for those and the idea that has the most votes gets a feasibility study to see if it can work in the community.

Q: Are you concerned at all that people won’t get involved?

A: That always happens. There are some people who don’t want to get involved, but I hate the words “not involved,” because people have reasons. Especially in communities where people worry about paying rent, having enough money to feed the children, those kinds of things. In communities where there are concentrated levels of poverty, coming to a meeting is the last thing on their mind. So my job is to meet people where they’re at. You can’t just pass out fliers, say “come to a meeting” and if people don’t show up, say people don’t want to get involved.