Common Wealth Development Purchases Arbor Covenant Church: Investing in the Future
Joyce Boggess tends her “Garden of Eatin’” on the grounds of Arbor Covenant Church
Part 2 of 2
By Jonathan Gramling
While the Arbor Hills area is primarily a solid middle-class neighborhood, it also has working-class and aging housing on its fringes. And as a solidly residential area, it also has a dearth of public spaces beyond its parks. There is no commercial district per se and little — if any — governmental infrastructure.
For several decades, Arbor Covenant Church has acted as a quasi-community center. And they have also projected out long-term that their declining numbers would not be able to financial support the viability of the grounds and building that they owned on McDivitt Road off of Todd Drive.
“We’ve been pretty level,” said Joyce Boggess who has been a member of Arbor Covenant Church for the past 35-38 years. “The decrease of members has been in terms of people getting old and passing away and people retiring and moving to wherever their children are. They have their first grandchild and that’s what their plans were in the first place. So we had a decline in membership. We’ve been partnering with Memorial UCC Church in Fitchburg for decades now, both with services and service. We also had a vision of what we wanted to be anyway.”
There have been a lot of good works happening at the church in keeping with the congregation’s faith.
“We started inviting community people to use our resources in whatever way they needed to,” Boggess said. “We had a Good Neighbor Essentials Pantry. That is probably one of the reasons we renamed our building the Arbor Good Neighbor House. It’s not a formal pantry. An Essentials Pantry is everything that food stamps cannot buy, from women’s hygiene to diapers to wipes to detergent. We call them essentials. And along with the Essentials Pantry during the summer, whatever comes out of the garden, I sit there with the produce and give them away to community members who want or need it.”
Boggess has also been concerned with the nutrition of the community dating back to her days as the director of the Early Childhood Learning Center.
“I’ve had a garden here since we closed the Early Childhood Learning Center on Hughes Place,” Boggess said. “We took the Garden of Eatin’ from there and began it at Arbor Covenant. I already had a personal garden spot, so I just added another spot and named it The Garden of Eatin’ at Arbor. The kids named it that 25-30 years ago.”
Arbor Covenant Church has also become a meeting place for groups from the Arbor Hills Neighborhood Association to refugee resettlement groups.
“We’ve had several people meet there,” Boggess said. “We work with the refugees in the community, the Iraqis and Iranians and a Swahili-speaking group. They meet there and it has been great having them there. The one viable thing that has been going on for almost as long as I’ve been there is the Creek Day School. They are there every day. We work with Jewish Social Services and they send people over. The African American-Jewish Friendship Group that I belong to meets there often. We did a Seder meal there. That’s the kind of thing that we want to see happening in the community, use the Arbor Good Neighbor House for whatever. Use it for weddings or even if you want to have a prayer service or a church. We’re open to that too.”
In Boggess’ view, refugees are not just people coming from war-torn areas like Iraq. They are also people trying to escape the ravages of poverty and violence in some of America’s cities.
“What my thing has been and what I did in the Early Childhood Learning Center — often it wasn’t my own clients because people would drop in off the street — was to serve refugees, even if they were just from another state. We would give them an idea of what to do. They would stop in and ask questions like where the daycare is or which school they should go to. I am going to try to set up something when I get some free time — since I am just writing and researching, I can do that from anywhere — I would like to have a center for refugees from other states. And I guess I would call them newcomers. It’s needed.”
On some level, Boggess has been a bridge between Common Wealth and Arbor Covenant Church. Back in the 1990s, she owned a resale shop on Williamson Street, within Common Wealth’s original development area.
“I was excited, of course, when I heard that Common Wealth was purchasing the building,” Boggess said. “I sat on the Common Wealth board when they were building the Yahara Place and other properties. I was excited for Common Wealth and I was excited again to be partnering with Common Wealth in some way. I was the chair of the church for six years and I’m still on the leadership team. I’m really close to the information that is going on. By working with Common Wealth, I know how it takes a while and I may not be around when it is finished. But I have faith in Common Wealth and Arbor that this will happen. We have hopes that it will go well.”
And certainly that is the intent of Common Wealth.
“There is a lot there,” said Justice Castañeda, executive director of Common Wealth said. “There are the gardens. It’s almost four acres of green space and the building where they have a daycare and the playground. The playground is huge. It’s so healthy and amazing to watch the children just running through there and having space that is safe and secure and for them to explore. It’s really cool to watch that. It is a really cool spot in West Madison. For right now, it is going to be doubling down on the support work thinking more in a focused way about how to leverage everything that Common Wealth is for the conversations that are already going on.”
In the future, as pressures to redevelop the area grows — the property sits on the Cannonball Run bike path and is adjacent to Also Leopold Park — the property will be in good hands ensuring that the needs of the residents and community are listened to and taken into account with any kind of redevelopment that may occur. The property is in the good hands of Common Wealth Development.