5 Questions: Sara Vaas

Amelia Allen (Sixty 35 Media)

Sara Vaas, Executive Director of the Council of Neighbors and Organizations, is spearheading a free 10-week course called Neighborhood University, seeking to “establish a foundation of civic knowledge for engaged citizens in Colorado Springs and El Paso County.”

What is Neighborhood University?

We’re teaching neighbors how to be leaders in their own backyard. It’s a free 10-week class that helps citizens get engaged in neighborhood leadership. I think we hit a niche where we’re teaching a kind of community development that’s not being taught anywhere else in the Springs. 

What’s the course like?

There’s three sections in our 10-week series. The first section teaches skills on relationship-building, consensus-building, advocacy. We hear from panels of neighbors and different community leaders. The second section of Neighborhood University is about planning. Development processes, government decision-making hierarchies, what the strong mayor format of our city even means, housing, economic development. And then the last section of Neighborhood University is about communication. So how to communicate your message when you have those three minutes at the podium at a planning commission meeting or a city council meeting. What do you say? How do you convey your message? So they actually get to practice what that 3-minute speech looks like and get feedback from a planning commissioner or a city [councilor]. And then we have some folks talk to them about tools on relationship-building. Getting to know your city councilperson. You can have their phone number, you can talk to them, it’s good to invite them in. We really want folks to graduate with a holistic approach of confidence in navigating local government and working with neighbors to solve problems. 

How does this CONO leadership program differ from Colorado Springs Leadership Institute and Leadership Pikes Peak?

We identified a gap between professional development and neighborhood leadership development, mostly because of our history and working with neighborhoods. So CONO has been in the community over 45 years, hearing repeated questions and a community need for more information. There are over 750 neighborhood associations and [Home Owners Associations] in Colorado Springs, so we started getting repeat questions, seeing a need to build up neighborhood leaders so they’re helping each other — so we’re not reinventing the wheel. CONO doesn’t have the capacity to reach out to 750 neighborhood associations one by one on little issues. What we can do is provide programming that addresses themes that we’ve been hearing over the years.

What are some repeated questions that you get from community members at CONO?

Some of it is just, “Who do I go to for certain issues?” “Who’s my city councilperson?” “Who do I go to when there’s a development I didn’t know anything about?” Sometimes it’s just “Hey, there’s something I’m passionate about but nobody’s listening. So how do I organize a group of people to solve a problem?” It’s usually reactive kind of questions. What we’re trying to do with Neighborhood University is be proactive, organize beyond the specific issue — because there are more reasons to organize than an apartment building going up. What we try to do is teach people to look bigger, outside of a direct issue. Let’s build relationships. Let’s build partnerships. Let’s talk to the community because you’re hopefully going to be in a neighborhood for a long time and we want to make sure you know each other and know where to go for these issues in the future, and also do fun things together!

How did you get into community organizing?

I think some of it is innate. I grew up in a really small town in Ohio. I was involved in the community through social work and the public library, but I’ve always been someone who brings people together, that likes to cultivate experiences for people. I did a lot of research about what other cities were doing [about community organizing], and I’ve been taking my knowledge of my experience of nonprofit and community work over the past 20 years and have been able to apply it to this really unique nonprofit that works with people inside neighborhoods and tries to engage them in the public, local government process.