In this episode of our local program Making Democracy Work, host Lynn Schirk speaks with Dr. Kevin Evans, professor of Geography, Geology and Planning at Missouri State University. Evans serves a variety of roles in the community and believes strongly in civic engagement.
On Making Democracy Work, we often hear about institutions or programs that influence our democracy, but democracy also plays out in our daily lives in our civic engagement, in our participation in a cause or movement. And in this way, it's we the people that keep democracy alive. Today, we'll be talking with one person about how democracy plays out in their life. Welcome, Dr. Evans.
Evans: Hi. Thank you, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.
Dr. Evans. I understand you're a professor of geology at Missouri State University and an active member of your community. Could you tell us about a moment when you decided to get involved and what motivated you to take that step?
There have been a lot of different reasons why I became active in civic engagement. One of them is because I was appointed as the Public Affairs Fellow back in 2013, 2014 and then 2016, 2017. And simultaneously with that being a doctor in philosophy and geology, I realized that geology is a philosophy as well. But I wanted to venture in. It's like, how do I earn my credit as being a philosopher? And so, I took on the challenge of becoming a stoic philosopher more or less back about 2016. So on sabbatical, I began studying stoicism and some of the earlier proponents of that. In that I became involved in civic engagement because everything is local when it comes right down to it, every crisis is local. Everything that we can do to influence our neighborhood, to influence our city is all local. And so I became very involved in that. And so in 2017, after listening to President Obama's farewell speech, he gave a line in there. It says, you should get involved in your neighborhood, become engaged in it. And it was the day after that, I think it was the 20th or the 21st of January that year that I called up the city and I said, I want to get involved in my neighborhood association, you know, how can I come a part of this? And I did and they told me it's like, well, you had one, but it's no longer functioning. And so we started it up again. And so I became the. Well, we arranged to have a meeting in March of that year, and 80 people showed up. It was when they were deciding that they should close Delaware School. And Delaware School did not close probably because of that first meeting. So many people were kind of up in arms about the closing of a school. And so instead, the whole school was demolished and then rebuilt. We kept our school, and we have a very active neighborhood association, so I got involved with all my neighbors at that point. And I'm now sitting on the University Heights Neighborhood Association as a board member there. And so, I'm very active in civic engagement.
Was there ever a time where you were apprehensive about your involvement?
Evans: Apprehensive implies that there's some fear. And I never really, like, took to fear all that much. I'm a geologist. Right. And so, we go out and climb cliffs, and I've been to Antarctica three times, right? So, it's like, you know, things happen all the time and it's like, you shouldn't live in fear. So I don't have much apprehension. I sometimes get disappointed. That's a little different issue. So I'm disappointed with some decisions that are made at the city level, even in the neighborhood level for for how things go with planning and zoning and things like that.
A lot of folks become apprehensive about getting involved because they feel like they just don't have the time to commit or energy. And so I'm wondering about if you can think of one really small action that you took that really ended up mattering.
Evans: So I've done a few things. We got the neighborhood association started, right? And so immediately after that, like within a year or so, I realized that the neighborhoods are kind of siloed by the city. And so, they want to address every neighborhood as though it's stand alone. But I realized that it's like Rountree, University Heights, Phelps Grove, we all had the same issues. And it's like, you know, we didn't want businesses in the middle of our neighborhoods, and we wanted to maintain the integrity of that sort of residential atmosphere. And so instead, what I wound up doing was forming something called the SNUG. It's the Springfield Urban Neighborhood Group. It's a recursive acronym, sorry, it doesn't spell snug, but it should. When I was in Wales on my sabbatical, snugs are little rooms that are set aside on the side of a pub where you can have your small meetings, you know, and discuss things in a private way. And so that's what the SNUG is. So, the city has a couple of different arms. One of those is the Neighborhood Advisory Council. And in the Neighborhood Advisory Council, they'll come in and address different issues that the city sees as important. And so that's kind of a top-down sort of approach to helping inform neighborhoods. But the SNUG is from a bottom up. And so, what do we not like, you know, that the city is doing that we need to correct. And so that's a voice for citizens that are not really necessarily — may feel underrepresented. And so, the SNUG is important that way. So, I started the SNUG. From the SNUG, we actually started a kickball tournament. So, I put out a post on Facebook that challenged some of our neighbors to the south in Meador Park, to a kickball tournament, and we had kids show up, kids of all ages, right? Eight to 88 is what we like to say. And so, we had a kickball tournament in 2019 was the first one. COVID one, year two, and year three. But then after that, the tournament has revamped. And so and we have 280 people last year. And this year we had like 220 people show up for the kickball tournament. And so, it's fun. It's bragging rights for neighborhoods, essentially.
Dr. Evans, is there anything that you'd really like our listeners to consider about their ability to get involved or engaged in their community?
Evans: Never doubt yourself. You know, I think the most important thing is to just take that first step. And so, if you're not sure how to get involved, talk to your neighborhood folks first. You know, because we love to have people that come together, you know, with us to, well, first of all, every organization, it has to be a money making organization in some way. And that money making that we do is through the Bass Pro cheering challenge. And so we put on a cheering capacity every year. It's the first weekend of November. And in the marathon, we dress up as pirates. So, we're the Delaware pirates that do that. And so, we get money out of the from Bass Pro Shops for that event. And then there's other funds that we can gather. And the nice thing is, so we're not just money-making organization, a nonprofit organization, we can take donations. But the whole reason for it is our long-term goal for Delaware neighborhood is to fund a scholarship. So, we want a student from our neighborhood to be able to go to a local institution. You know, we're still working on the endowment right now, but it's a nice, it's a good feeling because it's a long-term goal. The short-term goal is to, we provide $50 a month for the Delaware school as well to help the teachers, to help the students there that are not getting the food that they need and things like that.
And so good advice. Never doubt yourself. Dr. Evans, thank you so much for being our guest today. This has been a program of the League of Women Voters of Southwest Missouri, and a reminder of how democracy works when people show up.