Civic Story: The Sparks
Beauty beams from the colorful garden outside Elizabeth & Paul Sparks’ kitchen window. The Sparks live on a block full of beautiful greenery, lively neighbors, and murals giving story to indigenous peoples. They are a part of the Catholic Worker Community, volunteers who live with, communally support, and provide hospitality to people in transition.
Liz describes it as “gardens in the center, having meals, and finding ways to connect people to jobs and having a renewed way of life.”
Liz and Paul are longtime residents of the Hilltop neighborhood, having lived in the area 14 years. “I like that Tacoma feels a little gritty. It doesn’t have a lot of perfect, but it’s got a lot of beauty,” says Liz. A gigantic fig tree hangs over the patio, separating the Sparks’ home from the Guadalupe House, a clean and sober transitional home for people experiencing homelessness. “There are many perspectives that are brought to the table. There’s an opportunity for creativity in building things together with the community…there are spaces where people are invited to be present, that feel like neighborhood spots.”
The meditation garden, murals, and community garden are a collaborative effort of the neighborhood. Liz helps to lead projects to build and maintain the beautiful spaces on the property. Chickens, a greenhouse, a water fountain, and honey bees are all part of the beautiful landscape. “When people are living outside, or people walk by and really are just having a hard time, and they are able to walk by something beautiful and that’s taken care of, it actually strengthens a person’s well-being. And that’s worth it for me.”
Presence is a quiet value with which Liz and Paul live. They often host visitors, they greet the many travelers walking by, and they spend time in discussions with other residents sharing the same block about how to better their neighborhood and city. “When I think about what my role is,” says Paul, “at bare minimum, I gotta slow down enough to figure out how my gifts and my passions and skills fit together with the other relationships here.”
“Every day,” says Liz, “when I show up, I am one person of many. It’s not about my perspective fully, and I’m reminded every day that other people need to have voice in contributing to our dynamic as a neighborhood. When we have [communal] meals, just having many, many people that see differently than I do — there’s a lot of beauty in that. Being a part of that brings me a lot of life.” She pauses. “And it’s also difficult too.”
Being with folks from vastly different experiences isn’t a job for the Sparks; it’s their everyday reality. The Catholic Workers and Jesuit Volunteer Corps live with the guests of the Guadalupe House in a communal support model. Once a week, the house hosts an open liturgy and community dinner. In the summertime, the gathering lounges on a large back brick patio, with people spilling out into the gardens, sharing in a reflection and prayer before chowing down on home-cooked food.
Liz, an attentive woman with eager compassion, has practice being a neighbor. “I have this mirror of what my reality is. It’s always in front of me,” says Liz. “There’s not a lot of people who know how to listen. And I’m not saying I know how to do it, but oftentimes I find myself not speaking at all in a day, in a community of people who have a lot of pain or who haven’t learned how to practice the art of listening.”
On Tuesday evenings, the gathering often looks like people who don’t know each other sitting together. Instead of the vibe you might get at a shelter, where people serving eat apart from the people served, everyone eats together, sharing a bench at a long table. The guests of the Guadalupe House come from all walks of life — some from years in shelters, some incarceration at the Northwest Detention Center, and most, displacement. All are invited to share in the liturgy before everyone eats together as neighbors.
Paul — a published author, nonprofit director, and instructor — is quick to point out how much he learns from his neighborhood. “We used to live a few blocks down the hill.” Having lived there for years, Paul observes, “On Fawcett there are a couple of tall towers that are senior homes, where basically — the way I see it is — where you put your parents when you don’t think they’re relevant to society and life, and they go there to be irrelevant and die…Everyone’s moving very fast, and they’re just up there in that tower with their little tiny windows, and they’re invisible.
“There was this fella Alfredo [on G St]. He basically had no birth certificate, didn’t know any person or family, had a history of migrant working, a history of never knowing when he would be displaced. One day some 20 years ago…he somehow stumbled his way here and was invited to be a part of this community.” At the time, the community had been longing for a native Spanish-speaker who could be a bridge. “[They told him], ‘You would be an amazing strength to this community.’ So he comes, he lives here, and he becomes this absolute character in the neighborhood. He has nicknames for everybody. A couple years ago, he gets cancer, and the whole community, people from all over who had known him from over the years came, talked with him, brought tokens of remembrance, laughed at the nicknames he’d call them. Nora’s daughters, when he was really sick and close to dying, came over and put bandaids on his arm and just were present with him. And when he died, people had a memorial gathering and celebrated his life.
“Here [at Fawcett] on the one hand, you got people — who, maybe they grew up living the kind of success story everyone told them to live — now they're up in this tower, nobody knows who they are, what they're about, they’re completely irrelevant. And then you got this guy Alfredo who's got no family, no birth certificate, completely unknown, and ends his life in complete dignity and being an incredible contributor to the life of the community. It made me say to myself: when I get old, which story do I hope for, for my own life?
“I want to end up being one of those people who’s a part of community that at least sees me as a valuable part of their lives even if I can’t think anymore.”
The community frequently hosts discussions about justice, housing, immigration, and food — all issues that are pressing needs for the neighbors. Any need is a need the community wants to address.
“I’m really tired of having to send people away that are not able to afford downtown or even Hilltop anymore,” says Liz, who has hopes for affordable housing units in place of the old parking lot next to their house. “I would love for some of these [new] buildings…to be affordable and where people can be present here.” Liz’s dreams for building tiny homes and renting them out to tenants at a reasonable price, are already underway.
Paul adds, “The great urbanist Jane Jacobs once said, ‘A great city is made up of great neighborhoods.’ And if you think about great cities around the world, they have clear, historic, identifiable neighborhoods that have their own unique cultures and personalities. And what I hope for Tacoma, but also for our neighborhood here in the Hilltop: I hope that the Hilltop remembers its story.”
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED DECEMBER 21, 2019