EBALDC’s Avalon Tenants Advocates (ATA) Amplify Community Needs Through its Newsletter and Local Organizing at EBALDC Senior Residence

For years, residents at EBALDC’s Avalon Senior Housing complex successfully advocated for themselves and their community, incorporating a newsletter publication into their efforts.

How It All Began: Organizing for Traffic Safety

Beth Esperanza Rosales, Avalon Senior Housing resident and Avalon Tenants Advocates co-founder says that the seniors there began speaking out on behalf of their community approximately 7 years ago: “We at Avalon started advocating…for a crosswalk right outside our gate. There is a Pak ‘N Save across the way, seniors were jaywalking and falling with carts right outside.”

Beth described seniors having to navigate a sidewalk near San Pablo Avenue, a 4-lane state highway, right outside the complex, a street where traffic regularly sped by many miles above the legal speed limit. “A couple of people fell and almost got hit by cars whizzing by. That’s what got us organizing at City 

Hall with the City Manager and City Council. We met with then-Mayor Troy Donahue, and he said ‘let me look up where we are talking about.’ He put his camera on Google Earth and [right at that moment when the street came into view] we saw the sidewalk. [It was] right by our gate across from the Pak ‘N Save, and one of the ladies fell with her cart in front of the camera. Then he said, ‘I’m going to call my transportation people. Let’s get a crosswalk there.’”

The City of Emeryville agreed to allocate $266,000 to construct the San Pablo Mid-Block Crosswalk, a pedestrian walkway on San Pablo between 40th and Adeline.

4 years later, during the Covid pandemic, the seniors at Avalon finally got their crosswalk. Says Beth: “In between [the time before the crosswalk was completed], we said we needed to communicate [how this all happened] with all the tenants. We thought [a newsletter] was a [good] way to organize tenants and [be] a tool for community building too.”

The Avalon Times

Beth noted that the senior organizers “thought this [newsletter] could really help build our community. We wanted it to be tenant driven, so maybe tenants could write the pieces. We also wanted to instigate a community garden with some of the young kids in the area. City Slickers Farm built us two plots [for the garden], and we got [the newsletter] going with tenant-created content.”

The Avalon Times started out as a 5-page black and white document with no pictures, no images. Then, says Beth: “we started to coordinate it with the community meetings; the tenant association meeting was every other month. And we thought we could print 6 issues a year. That was in 2019, right before Covid.”

Tim Fisher, who moved to Avalon in November 2020, said he first heard about The Avalon Times on the laundry room bulletin board. He was interested right away in contributing. “I was in the PR business for many years, and what I liked most about my job was the writing. Now I do whatever comes up for the newsletter. It’s a fun opportunity for me to have a writing outlet. I also write for the San Pablo Avenue Community Newspaper.” Having worked on the ATA newsletter over the last few years, Tim says “It’s a great tool for creating cohesion and a sense of community and camaraderie. People do respond to things in the newsletter. There are issues we need to talk about and share with everyone. It’s a great community building and neighbor-bonding tool.”

On the Newsletter Project as a Means of Building Community Connection

At Avalon, there are 67 units with about 80 people in residence. “Our meetings are usually attended by 19-20 people—so about a fourth of the population [in the building],” says Tim. “The newsletter is a way to converse with each other and to strut our stuff. [Working on it together] has evoked a warm environment…. One thing about senior buildings: there are a lot of people that don’t come out that much. At the very least, this is a way for them to participate in community even though they themselves may not be actively involved. It was a kind of a communications lifeline during the pandemic.”

Regular contributors to the newsletter include Lui Gonzales, James JB Brooks, Mary Rose Poor, Dean Doris Brown, Tim Fisher, Bernie Lustgarten, and Dennis Brown. Featured elements include a crossword puzzle, updates from the Property Manager, Resident Coordinator, and Maintenance Man – space for EBALDC staff to talk with tenants, poetry, mental health issues, and notes from the tenants’ association meetings.

On Replicating the Tenant Advocacy Model

The seniors at Avalon hope to share the lessons learned from their years of advocacy and community building through creating the newsletter with other EBALDC residents. Says Beth: “We’ve offered to help to share our knowledge and newsletter with… tenants in other buildings. At Noble Towers, we have been working with Cathy Eberhardt to share how we organized ourselves. We hope to export this model.” She also noted that Avalon residents have shared their experiences testifying to public agencies at the Emeryville City Hall when issues affecting them came before the body.

“An Evening of International Cuisine” Potluck at Avalon Senior Housing

She notes that while the newsletter is a communications tool toward community building, “What is key are the relationships that the residents have developed over the years. These have resulted in our cohesiveness in many areas like civic engagement, advocacy, negotiating with management, beautifying our surroundings, and having fun!”