Civic Participation and Community Action Sourcebook

Section Five

Don’t Take “No” for an Answer: A Poor Neighborhood Organizes

by Brenda Bell and Elnora Yarborough

Several years ago, Elnora Yarborough saw a problem in her community and took action to solve it. She started alone, but before long she got the neighbors involved in her efforts to get a school bus to come through her community. Eventually she and her neighbors joined JONAH (Just Organized Neighborhoods Area Headquarters), an organization of low-income residents of seven rural west Tennessee counties. JONAH was started over 15 years ago to organize residents of Madison County, Tennessee to solve community problems. The organization has grown to include eleven chapters in seven counties. Members work on many different issues, including health care, transportation, and schools. When Elnora first become interested in JONAH, she was asked to arrange a meeting of area residents to talk about how people could work together to solve their problems. Ninety people showed up for the first meeting of the West Madison chapter. Elnora now serves as the JONAH representative to the board of the Southern Empowerment Project, an organization of nine grassroots community organizations in the southeast.

I guess I’ll start off saying that I learned how to stand on my two feet from a school event. We had five children. During the time when they all started school, we lived on a blacktopped road and the bus was coming through. And then we bought and built on a dirt road. This particular road had quite a few kids, walking from one end to the other out to the blacktop to catch the bus. So I decided that my husband and I would go and ask the superintendent if he could put a bus through there. This was a black community. He told me no, we didn’t have enough kids (in the neighborhood). I asked how many does it take. I told him I had 40. He didn’t believe me.

So my husband and I got a list of the kids, and I carried it back to the superintendent. Then he thought I had made up the names. I had to go back and get the addresses and their parents’ names. I went door to door, walking, and asking the parents if they would go over there in a group. Some people were scared, they had never done this before, and they didn’t want to do it. So I said, we’ve started and we’re not going to stop. I got all the information and carried it back. I had to make seven trips. I had to convince him.

Finally we got a bus – it was still a dirt road. When it was dry, the bus would come through, but when it rained, it didn’t. I would have to walk out to the blacktop with coats and boots to meet the bus after school. That’s when JONAH came through, we went to fighting for a road, and we got a road.

I have learned to stand up and fight for anything in the community and anywhere. Cause all you’ve got to do is ask. And if they say no, don’t take no for an answer. Because they’re going to say no – but keep going back. You’ll get something done when they know that you’re a person that sticks.

Reprinted with permission from the Center for Literacy Studies from its report to the National Institute for Literacy, July 1996, Equipped for the Future Initiative.

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