CAN president Chuck McFadden on the group’s past and future

The Cambridge Association of Neighborhoods (CAN) is dedicated to encouraging and assisting community members to be good neighbors. They strive to enhance the safety, quality of life, and well-being of Cambridge’s residents as well as promote code-compliant housing, social events, and community involvement in the city. CAN is open to both renters and homeowners, and newcomers are invited to join and help make Cambridge an even better place to live. Anyone interested can find out more at cambridgecan.org.

CAN President Chuck McFadden recently sat down to tell the Spy about the organization’s origins and plans going forward. (His answers have been edited for length.)

How did CAN get started?

Well, I joined the old civic association, the West End Civic Association, WECA. And they were kind of dying out, and I tried to get some things going and had some disagreement with some of the board members.

You remember when this was?

2016.

Oh, okay. So, it’s pretty recent.

Right. And there was a long time and work. They’ve done some really nice stuff. They used to do a walk on High Street and explain all the history of High Street, but they were getting older and were not into “come-heres.” Okay, so they liked it “from here.” So anyway, after some frustration, there I was, standing out on my lawn across the street. I used to live right across the street, and talking to Judd Vickers and Dave Thatcher and Roman Jesien. And, on the lawn, we decided to start a new association, and Roman came up with the name Cambridge Association of Neighborhoods, CAN.

So, that’s how we started, and the idea that we originally started with was just to try to develop neighborhood feelings within different blocks of the West End and try to organize the blocks into neighborhoods so people would know each other and then try to help each other out and just be nice. We helped people take down a fence, we took down a shed, we painted a porch, stuff like that, trying to help out our neighbors. And we used to do a big summer CAN Jam down at Long Wharf. And that all was a nice feeling. And it was definitely Ward 1 focused. And then COVID hit, so we couldn’t have big group gatherings, we couldn’t get together.

Everything was the Zoom meetings. And we evolved during that, into more of a organization that reported on what was going on. So, we report on the City Council, County Council, [Historic Preservation Commission], school board, planning and zoning, number of government stuff. So, that function that we do there is pretty well received, and people like knowing what’s going on with the different government stuff. We also advocate for different positions, especially in the zoning and code enforcement area. People don’t feel like they’re getting a response from the city, they contact us and we get involved and try to see what we can do.

What do you do?

Well, we contact the city and try to put pressure on, and we have a fair success rate in getting the city’s attention. We have gotten the city’s attention several times at board council meetings and stuff like that. We have flooded the council building with people. So, instead of just one person speaking, when they see 20, 25 people, it’s a different look. But it’s a pressure technique that only works once in a while. You have to be careful in using that. You’d rather just have conversations with the city officials and say, “You know, why don’t we do this and that?” So, it’s important to us to get the feel of what our members want. We have over 800 email addresses and we figure over 1100 members’ emails. Like this household: there’s only one email, but there’s my wife and I. So we’re figuring around 1100. I think that’s conservative, probably higher than that that we reach.

And I think one of the things people like is that we do it through email. So, we contact them through their email and they can either look at it or not. But part of the problem the city has getting the information out is they don’t have a vehicle like they used to have in the past. So, they put it on the website, but nobody knows where it is on the website. Nobody knows it’s posted. They’re trying to make an announcement, but nobody knows it’s there. So, how do they get it out? Cambridge is 13,000 people. Four to 5000, maybe a little bit more, are children. So, seven, 8000 adults are trying to get to and how do you do that?

Is the format of your meetings different than when you were starting? How did you do it when you started out?

Well, we would have members’ meetings and we would invite the mayor or a council person or the police chief to speak, somebody of interest. We’ve had the superintendent of schools, we’ve had Larry White, who’s doing the Shoreline Resiliency Project. We’ve had a number of people more than once to talk about their projects or their area of interest or what’s going on or what the future holds. And that’s received fairly well, although we would like more attendance and, as you’ve been to many a meeting, we could use more people there. I’ve pondered about, with as many members that we have, why can’t we get more active participation at members’ meeting? We’d like to get more people at the meeting and we’d like to get a more diverse crowd at the meeting.

Like, more than just Ward 1.

Well, yeah, but in terms of race. [Cambridge] is 50-50 and we’re not getting 50-50. An interesting thing happened. We used to charge $20 a year to be a member when we first started out and we hovered around 60 to 80 members. And then we decided to drop the membership fee and, as you can tell by the numbers, that was worthwhile. We really increased our membership and contributions. We ended up about the same as and we don’t spend a lot of money.

What do you use the money on?

Well, meetings and stuff, advertising the meetings, filming the meetings. We had to rent any room space when the library closed down. So, that kind of stuff. So, we’d like to get more diversity. An interesting thing is that we used to be primarily in Ward 1. Now we’ve got a lot of members in the outlying section, the new area next to Long Wharf and all around. And we’ve done some stuff. In fact, the last city manager put $15,000 in the budget to fix little things that we brought up. We went down to him for Blackwater Landing, behind the Dollar General Store, and they wanted a fence put in and they couldn’t get the city to pay attention. We went down and talked to the city manager and he agreed to put a fence in and he said he wished he’d done more about it because it really didn’t get to him, the request. So, he put 15,000 in the budget for stuff like that. The people brought it to the attention, not just CAN, but anybody bringing stuff that they had a little flexibility to do, minor stuff, you know, okay, which we thought that was listening to the public.

So, what other activities is CAN involved with?

Well, we’ve got several subgroups. We have one on [Cambridge Waterfront Development, Inc] that follows what they’re doing and trying to dig in and figure out what’s going on there. We have another subgroup that’s concerned about Cannery Park and what’s happening and not happening there. And I just met with the city manager on the marina committee.

So, what are CAN’s plans for 2025?

Well, right now we’re in the process of developing our priorities. We had a meeting in December to talk about priorities, and what came up was One, the publication of minutes is the most important issue that we do the reporting on. CWDI was Two, code enforcement issues is Three. And then it gets a little difficult because it depends on how many people we have to work on it. And we got some people working on the Cannery Way, which is a wonderful project. And there’s money for Cannery Park and the bike trail, but there’s not an overall concept. So, we’d like to come up with ideas. It could be a very nice project. So, CAN would like to get involved and get some issues going there. And of course, Cambridge Harbor. CAN was very opposed to the Y[MCA] moving down there. We had a survey, we had 680-some people respond to the survey. 85% were opposed to going down. And the main reason, the nonprofit going into what everybody considers the economic engine of the city. This should generate money through taxes and stuff, and you’re putting a nonprofit right in the middle of it.

Second, they were concerned about what was going to happen to the vacant school building where the Y is now. That’s the two big ones. But then you have the other ones like the safety issue of people getting to the Y, especially the youth. It’s right on the edge of the city instead of in the middle of the city. So, we’re very opposed to that. We’re opposed to building a 125-foot slip marina in there, which would be in direct competition with the city marina, which right now is only at 60% capacity. So it’s like, what were the city planners thinking? And the answer to that is there was one project at a time. There needs to be overall planning going on for the city. And it’s that feeling of frustration that our members have given us that we try to pass on to the city. I mean, I just met with the city manager yesterday and talked about exactly that. You need overall planning of what the city’s going to do.

What are your hopes for the future of CAN?

We’d like to see more diversity. And one of those things we’re going to be working on next year is how do we find out what people want and what they don’t want. It’s a difficult thing. And you know as a reporter, you get people who speak out, you can hear those opinions, but you don’t know what everybody wants. And I think CAN is probably one of the better methods of getting. So we have the capability of doing very sophisticated surveys and you can’t overuse that. But we’d like to use it more to get people’s temperature on different topics. A woman, Kim Miller, who is taking over as secretary, has a statistical background and knows how to do surveys and knows how to read the surveys more importantly when they come in and how to do the questions so you get the answers that you’re looking for.