Fact Sheet On The KAC-HSCDC Intergroup Project

Building One Neighborhood (BON) is a direct-service program that reaches out to Asian American merchants located in the vicinities of H Street Northeast, the Ivy City/Trinidad (Mt. Olivet Rd. and West Virginia Avenue) neighborhoods and Florida Market area. The guiding purpose of BON is to bring together various members of the community in order to improve multiracial relations between merchants and their neighbors and customers.

KAC-DC staff and volunteers have engaged at least 40 Korean American mom-and-pop merchants in the H Street corridor and its vicinity through BON. Most stores sell food retail, alcohol, grocery, clothing, or beauty/wig supplies. According to an estimate by the Alcohol Beverage Regulation Administration (ABRA), about 30 percent of liquor stores and 80 percent of groceries selling beer and wine in the District are owned by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, many of whom are Korean Americans.

KAC-DC conducts numerous outreach efforts to build relationships with the Korean American merchants, and to encourage them to participate in community affairs. In the summer, KAC-DC dedicates its several college interns to the program by placing them on-site at the H Street Community Development Corporation (HSCDC) one day per week. Interns help KAC-DC and HSCDC staff disseminate educational and outreach materials to the merchants, and to encourage merchants to participate in community meetings and workshops.

Through Korean ethnic media outreach as well as by visiting merchants door-to-door, KAC-DC tries to build positive relationships between merchants and community members. Outreach visits are an opportunity for merchants to vent their concerns and describe their experiences in community relations. KAC-DC disseminates materials with helpful information on programs and events. In conjunction with HSCDC, KAC-DC has helped merchants learn about the D.C. Master Business License program, Barring Notices, Voluntary Agreements, Project AA/PI Youth, and the D.C. Crime Victims Compensation program. On different occasions, KAC-DC has successfully encouraged and prepared merchants to attend ANC meetings, ABC board hearings, and other community events.

KAC-DC also encourages community members such as Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners to engage merchants in dialogue. For example, KAC-DC will participate in a dialogue with community members through a book club focusing on three chapters from Koreans in the Hood. In addition to attendance at several ANC meetings, KAC-DC has also worked with merchants with liquor licenses who have faced community pressure to sign voluntary agreements. Though it is not an official part of the BON, it is through its BON relationships that KAC-DC learned of merchants' hardships in facing communication and cultural barriers as they attempted to renew their licenses. As a result, KAC-DC extended its outreach efforts to the mainstream news, as well as the Korean ethnic press, in order to raise awareness surrounding merchants' difficulties in understanding the liquor license renewal and protest process.

The goals of BON are to:

• Create a sustainable model for conflict resolution, crime prevention, and forum for mutual discovery and understanding
• Improve customer relations

BON was initiated and is being continued for the following reasons:

• Economic Revitalization and Impact on the Neighborhood - Economic revitalization is ever growing rapidly especially at the lower end of the H Street corridor.
• Leveraging Current HSCDC Project with Building One Neighborhood - HSCDC selected the Northeast, Ivy City/Trinidad and Florida market area because of its long-standing efforts to revitalize these neighborhoods and its deep roots in these communities. It has chosen KAC as its primary partner because of KAC's reputation in the APA community and its involvement with the Building One Neighborhood Project which has a parallel mission to their project currently being undertaken along the H Street corridor.
• Recent Incidents between African American Residents and Asian Pacific American Merchants - In a rapidly changing environment like the Near Northeast which has seen an influx of new residents, displacement of old residents, improving economic conditions in some parts but not in others, and turnover of store ownerships, HSCDC has observed increasing tensions between merchants and residents/purchasers. Hostilities erupt periodically in the city without any systematic effort to design a mechanism to resolve these disputes or help prevent them from happening in the first place. Nationally, the most memorable eruption of hostility was the huge destruction of downtown and South Central Los Angeles in April 1992 that resulted from the riots, shootings, looting and overall chaos that erupted in the aftermath of the Rodney King trial verdict.

The specific issues that are addressed by the BON are:

• The relations between the Asian American storeowners and their pre-dominantly African American customers
• The degree of civic and neighborhood involvement by Asian American merchants
• Community member's perception of Asian American merchants as "taking over" all the stores in the neighborhood
• Loitering, littering and the safety of merchants in high crime neighborhoods

The program has four stages:

1. Fact Finding: Determine the nature and extent of interracial problems in the community through in-depth interviews with individuals representing the various stakeholder groups, such as residents, merchants, youth, civic and religious leaders, and the police.

2. Focus Groups: Gather small homogenous group of stakeholders to discuss and document perceptions, real stories, and specific examples of conflicts and problems, and try to determine the underlying causes of intergroup tensions that may exist in the community.

3. Intergroup Dialogue: Bring together representatives of different stakeholder groups and conduct facilitated discussions to gain better understanding about each other, and to develop an interracial team of leaders who commit to working together.

4. Implementation: Collaboration team will identify and agree upon one problem to address together, develop an action plan to resolve the issue, and implement the plan. By the end of the one-year grant period for this project, we expect that a foundation of trust can be started among the members of the partnership and a mechanism can be established for resolving disputes, preventing crime and improving customer relations. It will take more than a year for this unprecedented effort to "bear fruit" and probably many years in order for the individuals involved to fundamentally change their perceptions and behavior towards each other. We hope, however, that this team of leaders will replicate its successes and continue to work together proactively to help prevent and/or resolve future conflicts in the neighborhood.

Updated August 1, 2003