Highland Park Neighborhood Association

2006 general information

Mar 04, 2006

Upon reaching her term limit as President at the end of 2004, Rachel Cywinski presented the membership with what she viewed as the greatest challenge of her presidency--that is to achieve a full and completely diversified slate of officers, directors and advisors. With that in mind, she had visited every pastor of the 23 congregations in Highland Park boundaries and within the adjacent one mile area, visited each of the approximately 130 business owners in the Highland Park boundaries, and each of the principals of schools in the area as well.
The membership adopted the list, which included representatives of all ages and several ethnic and racial heritages; native English and native Spanish speakers; as well as single,married, divorced and widowed homeowners; including a youth representative who had grown up attending events at the James Bode Community Center, a deacon of a local Missionary Baptist congregation, representatives of local business and education, as well as a treasurer and committee chairperson from our contingent of faithful long-time members and former HPNA presidents.
Highland Park Neighborhood Association was ready to move forward with the intention that every officer, director and advisor, all of whom represented different aspects of the community, would commit to one's own devotion to the goal of a safe community and the Highland Park Neighborhood Association, and to draw upon the special and unique community members represented by each of these officers and representatives.
This was hoped to be the opportunity for revitalizing the Highland Park Neighborhood Association (HPNA).
When it was founded more than 20 years ago, HPNA had a founding group of members who remained active during their retirement years. We have been very fortunately to have many retired persons, most of whom were single or widowed, who have devoted untold hours to the community through various HPNA events, most recently including development and maintenance of the Highland Park Xeriscape Garden from 2001 to 2004, when the memorandum of understanding reverted responsibility to City of San Antonio Recreation Department.
Many of these devoted members have died. Some continue to volunteer, and others are no longer able to.
One of the challenges for Highland Park Neighborhood Association in recent years has been the growing trend of providing more and more services to the community with fewer and fewer volunteers. In 2003, we had the highest attendance ever at the annual Highland Park Spring Festival--more than 1,000--yet had to support that with the fewest volunteers ever. The festival that year was run by ten volunteers, two of whom died under stressful circumstances shortly after the festival.
The following year when the association decided that it could not continue to run the festival with so few volunteers and was unable to recruit more, the HPNA President Rachel Cywinski was bombarded with angry callers demanding that the festival be held. Rachel asked each and every caller for a personal commitment to volunteer, and not one person agreed to. This has been the general difficulty faced by the neighborhood association in recent years--struggling to provide increasingly-demanded and used services and resources which seem to be taken for granted without any financial or volunteer support from the community members using these resources.
So it was with great anticipation that we began 2005 for the first time ever with a full and diverse group of officers, directors and advisors.
The volunteer commitment that these persons agree to is a great contribution of time, talent and one's personality to one's neighbors. For those who have never volunteered in such a position, it is difficult to understand just how much a person gives of oneself to be an officer in a neighborhood association. Officers are rarely thanked, and often receive calls from persons who irresponsibly transfer their anger regarding issues with the City of San Antonio onto these community volunteers, who have no direct connection with the City other than advocating for our own community. It is a challenging task which requires unusual commitment and willingness to do what's best for one's community while often becoming the targets of the few and irresponsible who would prefer the neighborhood slump into total decay and lawlessness. For those who don't choose to volunteer their time, perhaps they don't understand that neighborhood officers are giving freely of their time without any compensation other than choosing to be responsible for their own neighborhood.
In any volunteer organization, then these duties which are fulfilled frequently with as much devotion and professionalism as these individuals devote to any area of their lives, yet we must be ever aware that the persons fulfilling these duties are volunteers and must perform these duties only at sacrifice to other priorities they may have.
And so when we bravely launched into 2005, it was no different than any other volunteer year in that volunteers do have to change their priorities due to other personal commitments. Our wonderful new neighborhood association president, who had spent dozens of hours with the former president discussing every aspect of the HPNA projects, neighborhood involvement, and how to maintain contact with local business and church organizations; then suddenly had to resign as the year began in order to provide hospice care to an ailing parent. Our Vice President Jack Elder then stepped up to the presidency as per the HPNA by-laws. Mr. Elder opted to retire from teaching Spanish and math within the San Antonio Independent School District at the end of the spring 2005 term, in order to devote his energies to being an extraordinary community volunteer (as he had been in the past, but without as much time to devote). Former HPNA president Rachel Cywinski informed him that she would be resigning as secretary in the summer due to increased work commitments and returning to college full-time; and attempted to transfer as much information about the association as possible to him. Long-time committee chairman Patrick Sandoval offered to assist Cywinski by assuming the responsibility to become newsletter editor, and free her of that duty. Once again the association attempted to move forward in hopes of developing the strongest and most diversified community effort ever in Highland Park.
In the summer Mr. Elder accepted an unexpected opportunity to move to Costa Rica.

The list of 2006 officers has not yet been provided to the website editor. They will be posted when received.

Recent newsletters have been available only in hard-copy format. The website editor has asked the newsletter editor to send her the electronic copies. They will be posted to this site when available.


For information about permanent and seasonal committee contacts, please see page "Neighborhood Contacts".