Love Newport Beach officially kicks off with inaugural meeting of leaders
In the Newport Beach Public Library’s community room Thursday roughly 50 civic leaders — from faith communities, businesses and government institutions — took a deep look at just what they love about the city they call home.
For some, the diligence of its full-service city staff stood out, while others extolled the values of how beautiful Newport Beach is. During part of a short interview session moderated by Brian Darrow, the lead pastor at W Church, Mayor Pro Tem Will O’Neill said what he likes most about Newport Beach is its people, the city’s resilience and the community’s willingness to get necessary work done.
“It’s one of those things, where especially when you get into an elected office, you realize that you have a ton of type A personalities in the city,” O’Neill joked. “That shows up pretty clearly at your council meetings from time to time, but the truth is that the best part about having a significant number of type A personalities is that more often than not people will have as their first reaction — ‘Oh, we have a problem? I wonder how I can solve that’ or ‘OK, I think we can figure that one out.’
“Most people in this city, at least, their gut reaction isn’t to go to City Council and say, ‘Hey, you need to solve this.’ We’ve actually had a lot of things in the city either solved or at least mitigated dramatically just by people looking around the neighborhood and having that as their gut reaction, and by the time it gets to us, it’s usually a problem and we do need to step in to help out.”
Ian Stevenson, the executive director for Trellis International, a nonprofit organization based in Costa Mesa that focuses on effective collaboration between churches, businesses and city leaders to better engage with their cities, helped organize Thursday’s meeting.
Love Newport Beach is in some ways reflective of the initiative launched by former Mayor Kevin Muldoon last year as “Renew Newport.”
But Trellis neighboring initiative director Reina Cuthill and lead pastor Brian Darrow of the W Church on E. 15th Street said Love Newport Beach has its roots in a group of local pastors who prayed together for the city.
Darrow said he had been thinking about how the church could collaborate with other leaders, specifically with other pastors, to figure out the most efficient way to help Newport Beach without reinventing the wheel. That was when he heard about the Love Costa Mesa campaign, which Trellis has been facilitating since 2011.
“They were helping thousands of people, and they were collaborating between the political leaders at City Hall with church leaders, with business leaders, and they were all on the same team helping their city, and so I said, ‘How can we do that?’” Darrow said, adding that he later met with Trellis, who encouraged him to start with prayer.
“I’m a pastor. I should’ve thought of that,” he joked. “So, now we have 17 churches in the footprint of Newport Beach, and we decided to start reaching out and getting pastors together and just start praying.”
That led to the city’s religious leaders reaching out to Muldoon. By October, the city saw its first Love Newport Beach volunteer day, which will in the future coincide with Love Costa Mesa Day in May, Cuthill said. The team responsible for Love Newport Beach includes staff from Trellis, but it also includes Darrow, Don Nemchock, Jeff Herdman, Kathy Gilbert and Terry Moore.
Thursday’s meeting was held to begin introducing city leaders to one another. Each individual in attendance was hand-picked because of their capacity to lead or their responsibility to a larger group of community members. Present were business owners, school board members, public safety officials, city officials and others.
Herdman, a former member of the Newport Beach City Council, said that after stepping down from that position he wanted to continue giving back to the city and sought organizations that would allow him to do so. Through a Corona del Mar Chamber of Commerce meeting, he crossed paths with Terry Moore, who recruited him to join the Trellis team for Love Newport Beach.
Herdman said he attends the nonprofit’s monthly meetings and provides input on its four initiatives — prayer, education, neighboring and homelessness.
“Plans are in the making for next year’s Love Newport Beach Day. Prayer is taking place for our city, city leaders, business and business leaders, communities, neighborhoods and villages within our city,” Herdman said. “Tangible support is being provided to our school, to seniors, to the homeless, as well as individuals who are isolated, in poor health or disabled. I can’t think of a better way to be giving back.”
The meetings will be held quarterly, with the next planned for February. Each will feature a different civic leader to introduce particular challenges and determine how leaders can pool their resources to help resolve them.
“Even though I think a lot of people have this conception of Newport, there’s still a whole lot of needs in Newport, and the point of these gatherings is to bring awareness on what’s going on in the city of Newport Beach that people can actually get into and collaborate on,” said Cuthill. “It could be one entity doing it all, but our goal and our hope with these gatherings is that everybody in the room becomes stakeholders for loving on their city — Newport Beach.”
Love Newport Beach’s next upcoming event is Love Our Schools Day on Nov. 4. For more information, visit lovenewportbeachca.org.
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