AARP Grants Help Revitalize Community Spaces

In Sacramento, a parking lot will be transformed into a plaza with benches and murals. In Vallejo, a trash-strewn alley will become a gathering space with benches and garden boxes.

Some of the newest recipients of 11 AARP Community Challenge grants in California are creating gathering spots that didn’t exist before, using grant money set aside to enhance public spaces with art and innovation.

Vallejo Main Street received a $15,000 grant to transform a neglected two-block alleyway as part of the city’s downtown revitalization.

“It’s not really being utilized, other than as an entrance and an exit way for some tenants, and then for disposal of trash,” says Alexander Matias, president of the board of directors of Vallejo Main Street, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the downtown of the community that sits on the northern end of the Bay Area. The group will work on the project with the city of Vallejo.

The project to revitalize the alley is slated to begin in the fall. It will include umbrellas, garden boxes and, eventually, classes for adults and kids.

Vallejo Main Street, part of Main Street America, which helps to revive historic downtowns, has experienced a renaissance after almost folding a few years ago. With the new grant, the group hopes to create a place “where people can have that family feel and engagement of different generations,” says Andrea Portillo-Knowles, its executive director.

Green spaces receive funds

In Sacramento, the Sojourner Truth African Heritage Museum will use a $10,000 grant to transform a parking lot with colorful murals and places to sit. Newly painted accessible benches will accommodate older adults attending events in the space. The new benches will feature metal mesh and a protective coating that makes them suitable for the city’s torrid summers.

With help from AARP and others, the project overall will marshal 70 volunteers to paint a ground mural on asphalt and install the benches. At least half of the volunteers will be over the age of 50, says Alpha Bruton, the manager for the grant project.

Other grantees aimed to help improve public spaces and support their community:

• Adams Avenue Business Association in San Diego received $20,000 to create a community mural and transform an alley into a green space. A pop-up event will feature mural designs that were based on community input. Residents and professionals will work to create the art.
  
• The city of Imperial Beach received $15,000 to create and maintain a community garden with raised planting beds and accessible benches. The space will also be used for classes.
  
• Streets for All, an advocacy organization in Los Angeles, received $15,000 to host pop-up events where community members can help identify solutions to reconnect a neighborhood that for decades has been bisected by a freeway.

***

Other Grants: Return of an Ancient Tradition

When Ryan Smolar was visiting Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2023, he took a pre-Hispanic cooking class in the home of a woman by the name of Vicky Hernandez, whose kitchen was literally carved into a hillside.

Smolar went there with two young Latina women from the U.S. It was a “transformational experience” for all of them, he recalls.

Smolar’s group, Placemaking-US, received a $16,675 AARP Community Challenge grant to develop a community comal — or traditional griddle — in Long Beach, aiming to demonstrate pre-Hispanic nixtamalization cooking traditions.

Those traditional methods often occurred in a public space, and this cooking will as well. Nixtamalization is a Mesoamerican technique in which dried corn is steeped in an alkaline solution to soften it before it’s ground to make tortillas.

“We’re always trying to get closer to the land and the ecology and the immigrant stories around food and also healthy eating,” says Smolar, PlacemakingUS’s codirector. “This kind of touched on all that.”

A Southern California-based nonprofit, PlacemakingUS promotes the creation of public spaces.

And that cooking teacher from Oaxaca? She has a daughter who lives in San Diego, managing a Wendy’s restaurant.

Soon, Elvira Garcia will be involved, teaching pre-Hispanic cooking at PlacemakingUS’s community comal — just like her mother continues to do in Oaxaca.

Barbara Kingsley-Wilson, based in Long Beach, has reported for publications in California, Ohio and New York, and for AARP since 2020.

Also of interest:

• AARP invests in California Communities as Part of Nationwide Grant Program
• AARP livable communities map
• Keep up with local events and AARP advocacy efforts