They wave, I wave back: What drives a community activist?

Posted 8/21/12

If you go to the Tusten Town Board meetings, one of the faces that will become most familiar to you is that of Iris Helfeld. She is someone who is so passionate and so involved with community she …

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They wave, I wave back: What drives a community activist?

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If you go to the Tusten Town Board meetings, one of the faces that will become most familiar to you is that of Iris Helfeld. She is someone who is so passionate and so involved with community she should win an award. Oh wait—she did.

Helfeld received the Upper Delaware Council Special Recognition Award for “her role as a passionate citizen activist and community organizer in the Town of Tusten.” The awards ceremony was held on Sunday, April 24 at Wolff’s 1910 Banquet Hall at the Tennanah Lake Golf and Tennis Club. The award recognizes Helfeld’s involvement with the Narrowsburg school building and the Narrowsburg Bridge. “I am very humbled by it and very surprised,” she said of the award. “I have a great deal of gratitude about it.”

Helfeld and her partner Mary are from Long Island and moved to Narrowsburg eight years ago. Helfeld is a teacher from the New York City Department of Education who retired after 31 years. For 10 of those years she did administrative work creating programs for children with disabilities and special needs.

Asked if she had always been an activist, she replied, “Not in the sense of community. It was always very work-oriented.” She righted wrongs in the workplace, making it better for the children, and created better programs. But she says she had never really done any kind of community organizing or activism. “When I came here though, this to me is such a special place, and the Delaware River is all so special to me that I just felt I wanted to give back,” she said.

Give back she did. When the old Narrowsburg School was going to be sold to be turned into a drug rehab facility, Helfeld felt like she needed to stand up. “I tend not to take things at face value,” she said. “I need to research things.” When more and more information came to light about who was buying the building and what the plans were, public backlash grew in large numbers. Many people turned out to the town board meetings to voice their opposition. “For me, it did not feel right, it did not smell right; I just had a gut feeling that this was definitely not right for that building in this town,” Helfeld said. “It was not just that it wasn’t right for the town, but it would have been very confining for anybody who was in there.”

A group spearheaded by Helfeld was formed, called Narrowsburg Organized for Responsible School Usage (NORSU). To make a long story short, because of the efforts of NORSU and the community, the building was not sold for a rehab facility, but was bought by Brendan and Kathy Weiden, who are turning it into a multi-use community building. “It was really important for [the building] to be something that was community based,” Helfeld said. “The Weidens certainly were the right fit because they had the same goals as to what is important to the goals of the town, the community and the area.”

This is the time during which Helfeld began attending town meetings. She has since been to almost every single one (she estimates missing only two or three meetings). She also joined the zoning re-write committee and attends the planning board meetings, which her partner also joined. “I had retired only from the New York City Department of Ed., I didn’t retire from life. And so I felt that if there were issues that I could help out with, or things that I could do to keep this place as beautiful as it is and be respectful of it, I would do whatever I could do,” Helfeld said.

She also launched a campaign to keep the Narrowsburg Bridge open. “I’m going to investigate things, and I’m going to see what’s at the bottom line of this. With the bridge, you can’t just close this bridge; this is the lifeline between New York and Pennsylvania. So I started this writing campaign and contacted a lot of people: senators, assembly people, Department of Transportation on both sides of the river, and started to really get their attention. Hopefully now they know that we are here, and we have a voice, and we use it.”

What leads a person to care enough? To want to help? To become an activist? It’s a love for community. “It is a community; everybody waves and says ‘hello.’ When we came from Long Island, [where] people don’t wave and say ‘hello,’ we felt like, ‘Where are we?’ People drive by in the car and we would say, ‘Who is that? I don’t know.’ They wave, I wave back. There’s a sense of community.”

They bought their property in the flats of Narrowsburg with the Delaware River right in their backyard. “I have real gratitude about being here,” Helfeld said. “I am really grateful to be able to live in a place like this. I’m very grateful to be able to have the time and energy to put into work that I can do for the community. And I’m very passionate about it.”

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