The Community Organized with a Vision of Excellence (COVE) and “Dare to Revitalize Education through Arts” (DREAM), two local Norwood-based nonprofits that merged in 2017, held their first block party in 10 years in Norwood on Saturday, Aug. 10. It was an occasion for both groups to honor DREAM founding member, longtime community activist, and Norwood resident, Lyn Pyle, who, as reported, died on Oct. 13, 2023, aged 83.

 

COVE was propelled by a tragic shooting that took place outside Tracey Towers in 2007. Going from strength to strength over the years, despite some setbacks, the after-school program celebrated 25 years in the community in 2014, and was established to offer programming in martial arts, health and beauty, and literacy.

 

A crowd of more than 200 young children and teens turned out for the “Peace in Our Streets Block Party and Memorial,” held along Gates Place, between West Gun Hill Road and West Mosholu Parkway North in Norwood.

Aisha Norris, co-founder and executive director of DREAM, explained how both groups were growing all the time, and the annual block party had gotten put on the backburner. Norris later found out that before her death, Pyle was in the planning stages of organizing the return of the block party for the community.

 

“Her sister told me this was what Lyn was about to do, so we got the funding for it, and we made it happen,” Norris explained. She said men from the block provided security for the event, as members of DREAM offered facepainting for children as well as laying on different games and events. Both groups now plan to bring it back as a yearly event, once more.

 

According to the National Council of Elders, Pyle’s activism began when she was arrested in the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, California, and later became a longtime community organizer in The Bronx for most of her adult life. For 44 years, they said she acted, choreographed, and wrote politically provocative plays and documentaries with Mass Transit Street Theater, located at 75 West Mosholu Parkway North.

Pyle, a former member of Bronx Community Board 7, who advocated for the opening to the public of the Croton Water Filtration Plant project meetings, also wrote open letters to former U.S. President Barack Obama ahead of his address at West Point in 2009, and on another occasion in 2009, together with two other members of Bronx Action for Justice and Peace, Carolyn Eubanks and Dave Wenger, in which they called for an end to the Iraq War which began in March 2022 under Obama’s predecessor, former U.S. President George W. Bush.

 

In 1988, with several neighbors and a group of neighborhood teens, they said she co-founded the referenced Media Arts & Literacy youth program. In 2006, with a group of Bronx young people, she also co-created “AIN’T EASY,” a play that told their stories of living with violence. Out of this production evolved “Dare to Revitalize Education thru Arts & Mediation (DREAM!), training Bronx and Harlem students and their teachers in restorative practice and mediation.

At the block party, there was free food, a dee-jay, as well as candle-lighting in honor of Pyle, whose photo graced one of the tables set up along the sidewalk. Members also paid homage to a former student-member who had died a week prior to the party taking place.

 

Norris said of Pyle, “Lyn was my friend, my business partner, mentor and now she’s my guardian angel. Lyn started this program 40 years ago with other community members, and she was one of the cofounders and one of the lead members to transform this basement space, that was full of concrete, into an after-school program during the crack epidemic.”

 

Both groups are now based in that same basement, located at 3418 Gates Place in Norwood. Norris added, “The purpose of it was to give young people a safe haven.”

For the last two years DREAM has run a program that focuses on paired mediation and conflict resolution on the Evander Childs Educational Complex, located at 800 East Gun Hill Road in nearby Olinville. According to Norris, the program has helped reduce suspensions at the school by 68% and has reduced serious incidents by 73%.

 

Pyle told Norwood News at COVE’s 25^th anniversary that there was a need for a program like it in the community to lure local kids away from drug-taking which was known to be taking place at several corners of the neighborhood. “You can’t just say no,” she said. “You got to provide something positive that’s more fun, more exciting than hanging out with your friends and getting high.”