2009 Neighborhood Festival with El Kilombo at Old North Durham Park

This video was made shortly after our neighborhood community festival, which was held on July 11, 2009, in Old North Durham Park. It highlights a festival we hold every year in the park as a way to celebrate our community, feature neighborhood musical talent, strengthen community bonds through food, recreation, and games, and to raise awareness about efforts to prevent the privatization of the park and the accompanying elimination of the current full-sized athletic field.

For background: In 2003 a real estate developer and his wife started a charter school on the edge of our neighborhood park (they still both serve on the board of that school to this day). Since that time this real estate developer has slowly bought property after property around the park and has recently gotten the city to rezone a whole other residential section of our neighborhood in the immediate vicinity of our park (with an interest in future investment?). From the beginning this developer and his wife have done everything to stop our city government from applying the apportioned funds to refurbish our park as a full-sized athletic field and have instead insisted on eliminating the full-sized field (without any concern whatsoever of the disproportionate effects such an action would have on the low income Black and Latino residents that currently use that park as a space for physical activity) and remake the park to their liking. This is simply a brazen attempt to usurp our public resources. We want to know what happened to the tax bond money that was TWICE raised for our park and we refuse to let some financial interests dictate what is best for our park and for our neighborhood. For us, there is little doubt that the influence of real estate interests, the appropriation of public resources, the increased displacement of communities of color from center city districts, and the victory of property values over and above any other values, all of which are wrapped up in our neighborhood park, are indicative of the situation that our city and our country are currently living and point sharply to the necessity for a real change.

For more information, please visit our website: www.elkilombo.org

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• soccer
• parks
• community
• privatization
• gentrification
• black
• latino
• African-American
• immigrant
• migrant
• Durham