Roosevelt Park Neighborhood Association

In 1978, a group of residents on the southwest side organized to steer what happened to their own streets — and the Roosevelt Park Neighborhood Association has been at it ever since. The early record is unusually concrete: the association is credited with helping bring a fire station to the area, with the repair of the Roosevelt Park Lodge, and with running a house-painting program to keep the housing stock in shape. By the early 1990s the group had made a strategic call that still shapes its work — that Grandville Avenue, now Cesar E. Chavez Avenue SW, was the spine the whole area depended on, and it has poured resources into that corridor since. Today the association operates as a community nonprofit from offices on Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, doing resource navigation, leadership development, and organizing alongside the businesses and institutions on the avenue. Its most visible program is the Roosevelt Park Farmers Market, a community market on the corridor that runs Thursday evenings through the summer season and gives local growers a direct place to sell. The association has also worked hand in hand with neighbors on the Cook Library Center, which anchors children's and after-school programming on the same avenue, and with partners like the Hispanic Center of West Michigan. It is a civic organization in the older sense — founded by neighbors, run for the block, still meeting and still building. For the streets, parks, and business district themselves, see the Roosevelt Park neighborhood page.