Interview with Scott Bernstein - The Center for Neighborhood Technology, by Serena Bernstein

Editor's note: I was sorting past essays from the True Believer column and found this one that had not yet been posted to the blog. In 2009, all incoming TV students were asked to write a piece responding to the book, Hope Dies Last, by Studs Terkel. TV student Serena Bernstein interviewed her father, Scott Bernstein, President of the Center for Neighborhood Technology. I thought it was a good transition to the new focus, Rights, Radicals, & Revolutions.

Scott Bernstein is President of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a non-profit organization. He is fifty-eight years old. Scott is my Dad and I have watched him work tirelessly days, nights and weekends on these initiatives all my life.

So, you have worked at the Center for Neighborhood Technology most of your adult life?

That’s correct. I am now president of the organization.

The organization is a little over thirty years old. The purpose of the organization generally is to promote urban sustainability, and we believe that people organize to operate more efficiently, more cleanly in an environmental sense in relatively dense and convenient, well connected places. Most of the population of the United States lives in either metropolitan areas or small rural towns. So our purpose is to help people understand this and to find ways to keep improving that efficiency, and to make sure that the economic benefits of operating more efficiently are spread inclusively, equitably so everyone can participate in them.

We started looking at ways to improve community health. We began working with a community organization called the Christian Action Ministry on the west side of Chicago. We came up with three model programs – one on dog bites, one on traffic crashes and one on nutrition. Through the program, we began to see problems such as vacant lots, abandoned buildings and lack of garbage pick up. The community lobbied the alderman, and the garbage began being picked up with regularity. So, that was our first victory. The second program was on traffic crashes. We organized something called the workable streets program that got people to think about ways to handle traffic and transportation problems. All our small victories made way to the bigger ones. There was something called the Street Traffic Safety Commission and they didn’t generally listen to a lot of community input. But again, people came in with plans and slowly the city started to listen. Today, people put in traffic circles and bumps regularly, but I think our project was the first to propose doing that systematically in the city. We slowly started to chip away at the traffic crash problem.

The third model program was on community nutrition. It didn’t show up in the emergency room data, but there was a lot of degenerative disease and the respiratory infections were a sign partly of work conditions, partly of really bad air quality and partly of people not taking care of themselves. At the time, there were very few grocery stores and restaurants in the area. We came up with the idea of a community garden. Most people said that the gardens were hard to maintain due to vandals and vermin. So we started brainstorming, and somebody mentioned rooftop gardens. I came up with the ideas of a greenhouse. This would provide jobs for welfare mothers and grow food year round. McDonald’s paid for our very first greenhouse.

We organized the Center for Neighborhood Technology to be the kind of place that would allow communities to come together and figure out how to do these demonstrations. We wanted to be doing these programs with communities, as opposed to doing them to communities or for them, and we wanted to always remember that.

Over the past thirty years our organization has become fairly big. Including part-timers, about 84 people work here. It’s a ten million dollar a year organization. Some of it pays its way; we have something called iGo Car Sharing that almost pays its way. CNT Energy, which offers energy conservation services, pays its way. The rest of it is a combination of contributions from individuals, grants from foundations and corporations and contracts for research and demonstration programs.

These small victories certainly fueled my hope and faith in the human spirit. We learned how to be pretty good at researching what was going on. Unlike some organizations, we tended to not focus on single issues. We tended to focus on the connections between the issues.

Our organization is successful because if you do your homework, people will listen to you. You’re doing it for a cause. You’re doing it to help people. You’re doing it because there’s some urgency to it. Cities are where people live. It’s not just about the things that you buy. It’s how we’re organized spatially. Most people don’t get that yet. There’s a big cause for everyone to contribute to. We can put everyone to work doing it. So there’s a demand. My father was always in retail business and taught me it’s always better to be in a back order situation than to have too much of something. You try and create a demand that you can’t always quite fill. People will probably want more.

Serena Bernstein is a junior in the Television Department.