Fall/Winter 2006: On Principle

Sidebar: A Sense of Obligation

Many Portland residents have never heard of Montavilla, one of ninety-three neighborhoods in the city. Until last October, neither had Jennifer Tamayo. That was when Tamayo, a thirty-two-year-old Beaverton native, and her husband bought a house within the neighborhood's boundaries of Southeast Division Street and Interstate 84, and Interstate 205 and Northeast 68th Avenue.

Before they'd even hired the movers, Tamayo attended her first neighborhood association meeting. She was discouraged not only by the turnout (only eight people showed up and the president wasn't one of them), but also by what she perceived as a lack of productive discussion. Soon Tamayo learned the neighborhood didn't have a newsletter. As the corporate communications director for Papa Murphy's Pizza, she knew she had the skills to produce a monthly piece that would inspire more community participation, so she volunteered for the job.

Because she was new to the neighborhood, Tamayo hadn't been involved in a recent neighborhood schism--a disorganized and heated battle to reopen a public library that had been closed for twenty years as a volunteer-run library. The issue monopolized community activity for nearly a year, and by 2005, when Multnomah County ended the debacle by selling the building that had housed the library to a nonprofit organization, once-enthusiastic neighborhood activists had soured on all types of involvement. But when the energetic, highly organized Tamayo arrived on the scene, a few Montavilla residents saw in her a spark: just six months after she'd attended her first meeting, they elected her president of the neighborhood association.

Tamayo took the job out of a sense of moral obligation: she now spends about thirty hours a week recruiting committee leaders, editing the newsletter, working on a new website, coordinating activities, and reaching out to specific populations, such as the neighborhood's Russian community. "This is my calling," Tamayo says matter-of-factly. She realistically envisions the fruits of her labor: "Rome wasn't built in a day, and I'm definitely not trying to build Rome. I'm building a house. Maybe not even a house. I'm making sure some streets get carved out."

--Lucy Burningham

Published in the Fall/Winter 2006 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2006 Oregon Council for the Humanities