Residents of a Southwest Side neighborhood are using a grant of nearly $5,000 and a lot of elbow grease to turn a 750-foot strip of dirt along a city parkway into a butterfly and hummingbird habitat.
"We want to beautify it, first of all, and our neighbors will be more apt to want to keep their yards looking nice," said Alice Villa, 62, who lives in the Candice Anne/Carey Belle Neighborhood.
That's a 20-home neighborhood within Midvale Park.
By fall, Villa and other residents will look out their windows and see a desert landscape with benches and a picnic table alongside South Candice Anne Drive.
And they'll know they were the driving force behind making it happen.
"They each have talents, resources and connections with other people that they can bring to the group to bring the project forward," said Lisa Torres, project associate for PRO Neighborhoods.
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PRO Neighborhoods — which stands for People, Resources, Organizations in Support of Neighborhoods — gave the Candice Anne/Carey Belle Neighborhood a $4,853 grant on March 19.
"We support neighborhoods at a grass-roots level, and this is a grass-roots group," Torres said. "It's basically a group of residents who want to improve their area and are turning to each other."
The residents will use the grant money to buy tools, benches, tables and boulders, as well as trees and other plants — all materials that they can use to make the dirt bank that runs parallel to the street look better.
The dirt bank is between Candice Anne Drive and an branch of a wash.
Before the neighbors began working on it, the bank was a barren stretch of dirt that people would — and sometimes still do — park on, much to the neighbors' chagrin.
The residents are putting two big boulders on the bank to stop people from parking on it.
Though the neighborhood just received the PRO Neighborhoods grant in March, the residents' efforts to turn their neighborhood around has been a longer process.
A fear of area home invasions prompted them to work together, initially with a neighborhood-watch program, residents said. From there, they decided to improve the neighborhood aesthetically about a year ago.
They started out by painting a wall that runs parallel to the street and divides two neighborhoods.
"Then we put in seven trees, and then seven more. Every time we've done something, it's 'Gee, we like that. Let's do a little more,' " said Diane Steen, 63.
"I got sick of looking at the ugliness," she said.
Now she and other neighbors are working to make their vision for the dirt bank a reality.
They've asked the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and the Tucson Audubon Society which plants they should put on the land to make it a butterfly and hummingbird habitat.
And the residents are doing much of the labor themselves.
On a Saturday in April, nine of them worked outside from 6 a.m. to late morning, tilling and fertilizing the soil to get it ready for planting.
When the plants mature, the area will become a garden, a place where people can relax within the city, Steen said.
She has been using her networking skills to enlist support from the larger Tucson area.
One of the project's supporters is Trees for Tucson, which has given the neighborhood free trees, Steen said. Trees for Tucson is part of Tucson Clean & Beautiful, a non-profit environmental organization.
Though Steen and the other residents don't expect to have the project finished until August or September, they already have noticed some benefits.
Most children who used to walk on the dirt bank on their way to school are now respecting the neighbors' wishes and walking out in the street, Steen said.
Southwest Side
