This is excerpt from my memoir on community development that I learned in my Peace Corps service that fulfilled 3rd goal--bringing what I learned back home:
Fulfilling the third goal of my Peace Corps service, “to help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans,” wasn’t as easy to do. My PCV service was implementing a rural community development program in a Turkish village for two years in the 1960s. I partially fulfilled it on my return home by organizing tours of Turkey that was full of Greek and Roman tourist sites for Americans.
But I also found ways to bring back the knowledge I had learned in rural community development to my home community, an unincorporated area of Santa Barbara County that ultimately resulted in the formation of a new city.
What could be more community developing than that? This is an excerpt from my memoir published by
As a bedroom community to Santa Barbara, the Goleta Valley had no real community organization of its own other than the Goleta Valley Chamber of Commerce. It needed an established entity to ask for what was needed to improve the valley’s aging and dilapidated infrastructure, and to reduce chaotic development. More public transportation, water resources, and just smart community planning were needed to mitigate the effects of a growing population.
There was much opposition to any organizing effort that would create more than a bedroom community in the Goleta Valley. There were those who wanted to “belong” to the City of Santa Barbara so their property values would be the beneficiary of Santa Barbara property values. They wanted no part of a new, more rural city. Then there were the environmentalists that tended to cluster around UC Santa Barbara with its strong environmental studies program. They were afraid a new city would encourage more development.
But in fact, being unincorporated didn’t prevent development: property owners and developers had only to convince one County Supervisor that represented a larger area, rather than a city council responsible for the entire community.
Goletans couldn’t agree on what was unique about their own community. Was it a farming culture, bedroom community, or just funky adjunct to UC Santa Barbara? Many thought that, with prosperous Santa Barbara next door, what was the need for another city on the already crowded South Coast? Hence the impasse that had defeated earlier cityhood attempts.
The first step in building a livable community, in my view, had to be creating a town center that could focus planning efforts, and Old Town Goleta seemed just the place to do it. Old Town had been the historical center of the Goleta Valley with stores, a saloon, and a blacksmith for farmers in the early days.
It took two years’ of planning to accomplish just the first step that was formally approved by County Supervisors—The Goleta Oldtown Revitalization Plan.
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