by MARIE LACHAT

Those who garden know you can’t build a garden overnight; yet each year in January when catalogues appear, so do our dreams of lush, colorful perennials, plump shiny fruits and vegetables and glossy-leaved shrubs and trees.

We pore over the catalogues. We draw up plans and talk to our garden friends. We read garden books and attend lectures. We place our orders. We plant seeds and for days we see nothing.

Finally a tip of green peeks through the rich brown soil and we are ecstatic. With enthusiasm, we continue to plan. As gardeners we know that we must attend to the soil, add nutrients. When we have made all our preparations and the conditions are right, we plant our seedlings, water them in, mulch them, feed them and watch for healthy growth.

The work of starting and maintaining our garden of plants and shrubs is a lot of work and it continues throughout the growing season. With a job well done, we reap the rewards with bounties of fruits, vegetables and flowers. Building a community and a community association, too, takes a lot of work.

It is important to learn, to plan, to prepare, to research and to analyze. It’s important to get out into the community, to learn who our community members are, what their needs are and how we can address them.

For 55 years the Chestnut Hill Community Association has worked to build membership — at times with great success and at times less. Many volunteers have been part of these efforts and many continue to be. Always these volunteers struggled to find the right way, the right words to convince people of the need for a strong community and a strong community association.

Did you know that there is not a single neighborhood in Philadelphia that does not have a community association? For some, the same few do all the work; for others like the CHCA, there are tons of volunteers. All those who carry the banner of their neighborhoods recognize the need to fight crime and blight as well as fight to maintain as high a quality of life as possible and to be sure they are fairly served by their city.

John Ryan and Peter Winebrake know this.  They are bright, interesting, and fun young professionals who chose to live and raise their families in Chestnut Hill. To paraphrase Bill Cosby, they could have gone anywhere, but they chose Chestnut Hill.

John and Peter know some level of involvement is necessary to keep a wonderful thing going and so they joined the association, ran for the board and began an analysis of the history of membership. Seeing that membership numbers had declined really worried them. And why not? A message you can get from this is that too many people don’t care — the easiest way for a neighborhood to decline.

To make membership grow, they proposed an idea that seemed a bit extreme to some of us, but the best thing about ideas among reasonable people is that ideas evolve. For those who do their homework, stay at the table and hash things out, new doors can open.

I believe new doors have opened thanks to Peter and John. We are lucky to have them and their families as part of the present and the future of Chestnut Hill.

Marie Lachat  is the executive  director of the Chestnut Hill Community Association.