Dealing with strangers knocking at the door asking for money in the middle of the night was a common occurrence for one Sacramento State professor, until she decided to take action and help make her neighborhood a better place.

Dana Kivel, professor and department chair for the Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration, recently won the Outstanding Community Service award for 2007-08 for her work to make the Sacramento neighborhood of Oak Park a better place to live.

Living in Oak Park hasn’t always been easy, and Kivel has her share of stories about scary yet sometimes humorous incidents that have occurred in the five years that she has been there.

She recalled one incident where she was parking her car in her driveway, and a man got into the car with her, trying to sell her drugs. Another time, a friend who came over for a visit informed Kivel that there was a stranger crouched in her driveway. When Kivel confronted him, he became irritated and exclaimed, “Can’t someone make a phone call?”

Kivel said she knew to some extent what she was getting into when she moved into her new neighborhood, but welcomed it because she wanted to live in a diverse community in an old house. She recalled that her real estate agent thought that she was crazy for wanting to move into that neighborhood, but this didn’t stop her from moving into this neighborhood where loud music was common and drug deals were a regular occurrence.

“She moved into Oak Park because she wanted to do something for it,” said Steven Gray, professor and vice department chair in Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration.

Oak Park was a neighborhood that needed some help, and Kivel was right there to give it the care and attention it needed.

She noticed right away that there was a problem with drug deals, inconsiderate neighbors and slum lords. She also knew that there was only so much that the police and other agencies could do, so she decided to take matters into her own hands. She made the decision to do something both simple and difficult: talk to the drug dealers and her neighbors.

Kivel said that she started out by getting to know her neighbors, talking to them and learning about things in the neighborhood they thought needed to change. She also started going to Oak Park neighborhood meetings, eventually serving on the board. Then came the tough part.

“I had to ask people to stop selling and buying drugs,” Kivel said.

She would go out into her neighborhood and tell people that what they were doing was not OK, which was not always met with the best response. She said this was difficult to do, because people don’t like it when people come along and interrupt their behavior, or their way of life.

“People that move around in the criminal circle don’t like it when people like Kivel step in and try to change things,” Geraldine Nicholson, administrative coordinator for the Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration, said. “They operate in building fear in people, and if people are fearful enough, they won’t do anything to change things.”

Kivel has been one to not let fear get in her way, even when her house was firebombed a few years ago.

She said that six Molotov cocktails were thrown at her house, but luckily Kivel was not hurt.

“They scorched the front of the house and underneath the front stairs but didn’t do any structural damage,” she said.

The man who firebombed her house had a history of mental illness, as well as drug and alcohol problems. He was someone who lived down the street, and she’d had problems with him in the past. He was someone who would yell instead of talk, and disagreed with the fact that she was trying to change his way of life.

Despite the scariness of the situation, Kivel looks at the situation positively.

“Things happen for a reason,” she said. “When that firebombing happened, it brought a lot of attention to us.”

Kivel said that one good thing happened from an otherwise terrifying incident. Media coverage from the firebombing resulted in the city being more responsive to Oak Park. One example being that a liquor store that was a popular place for drug deals was shut down.

Oak Park wasn’t always in the condition that it was when Kivel showed up. She said that it was established in 1889 as the city’s first subdivision, and was a really great place to live. She cited one reason for the neighborhood going downhill as that the city allowed huge numbers of liquor licenses to be sold.

Kivel said that her neighborhood is very different from when she moved in; that it is like a new place and it is this way due to Kivel’s unrelenting desire to improve her surroundings.

Her latest project is a drop-in center where sex workers can drop-in and get tested for HIV. Gray said that the center is also a place that supports women who want to get out of sex work.

She also inspires her students to get involved in the community – whether it be by writing grants in her grant-writing class, or getting them out into the community spending time helping out in Oak Park.

“She is passionate about her work,” Gray said. “She is very hard working and she really cares about the community.”

Stephanie Dumm can be reached at [email protected]