DSNI

     Holding Ground - The Rebirth of Dudley Street film is a film about hope in a community where all hope was gone.  The film showed Dudley Street when it was at it's finest with jobs and wealthy white and irish middle/upper class people.  The movie went on to show how when the jobs started leaving the city the wealthy people were also leaving following the jobs or getting married and moving away.  This left the land vacant and left a lot of home abandoned which then gave the area the name of "the ghetto".  There were programs that were going on then that were giving help to the whites to move into the suburbs, but help wasn't given to the blacks, to help them get into the white suburb.  Instead the blacks were more pulled to moving into the community that the whites had abandoned.  Immigrants from Africa, spanish speaking countries, and people from down south were moving north and into the Dudley Street area because they could afford it but what they were investing in was really damaged and the community was looked down upon.  One of the people mentioned that the "root issue is racism" by the banks and them not helping out the blacks.
     With all the issues that the community was seeing going on they decided to create a collaborative leadership type of community.  Which helps within a community that is trying to work as one to make a difference and this helps because with this type of leadership "everyone is on an equal footing and working together to solve a problem and create something new..." (CommunityToolBox)  Like most organizations in the 1960s and 70s, the DSNI had "involvement of the citizens...involvement of low-income people in organization decision making." (Hardina)  Those are some of the positive and successful things i saw that the community did on approaching the issue and trying to resolve it.  They got the community members involved and three from each nationality so that the point would get across to all the community members in a language and manner they understood.  In the film they mentioned how difference can only be made when everyone from where the problem is participates and the programs in Holding Ground the "programs were...operated by community-based 'action' agencies that include members of the target population on organization boards and in other decision-making roles." (Hardina, 13)  Again at the meeting once community members began to volunteer and help out thats when change came about.  
     At the end of the film some differences that begin to see was change, that from the community stepping up and going after what they wanted made a difference.  For example, when the got to lock up the dumping zone that was in their neighborhood by a company, and when they tried to buy a certain part of Dorchester/Roxbury which had the most opened land but a lot of homes were owned by different private owners, at first one believed that buying the houses would create a profit later or make a difference.  And when the community faced a down point in funds everyone lost hope except the community and because of this at the end they were able to get enough funds/loan to buy the houses renovate and sell it to new home owners of their community.

     This film showed how a little hope can go a long way.

PS. One thing that stood out to me was the boy/guy who was standing in front of the mural and said to the camera guy to look around that he was the only camera guy there filming the positive things that were going on.  But that if he had just gotten shot there would've been like five more camera people there filming trying to get the details.  He also mentioned how the media doesn't like reporting the positive going on in a community but once something negative happens they are all there to report and I thought that was interesting for him to say because that is completely true in most communities that are looked down upon.