Meet Community Betterment: The Organization Behind Decades of Pleasant Hill Projects
By Connie Whitlock
Publishing Editor
The Depot. Soccer. Trails at the city lake. The caboose. Christmas carriage rides.
They are all familiar pieces of Pleasant Hill, and some have been around long enough that most of us probably don’t give much thought to how they got here. They are just part of our town.
For more than three decades, the Community Betterment Association of Pleasant Hill has been working, sometimes taking on projects itself and other times helping someone find a way to make an idea happen. During a recent work session with the Pleasant Hill City Council, members shared some of those stories and also discussed something that may be even more important now: who will carry that work forward.
The roots of Community Betterment go back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to longtime member Randy Miller, who shared some of the organization’s early history with the council. The organization received its federal tax-exempt status in 1994, meaning Community Betterment has now been operating as a nonprofit for more than 30 years. “It’s not something that just happens,” Community Betterment Vice President Myra Doehla said of improving a community. “It’s hard work.”
One of the earliest and most visible examples was the Depot. Miller said his father was involved in efforts to save the Depot when the railroad no longer wanted the building, and it could have been lost. The organization raised money, but much of what happened next came down to people willing to work.
Miller said gifted students from Pleasant Hill Middle School helped with the design of Depot Park, while volunteers helped construct improvements. Local residents helped build a fence between the depot and the tracks. “It was truly grassroots economic development,” Miller said.
That happened again when Pleasant Hill children wanted to play soccer. “The kids wanted to play soccer,” Miller said. At the time, it wasn’t a city recreation program. Local people wanted to create one, but they needed a nonprofit organization that could collect money and help get things started. Community Betterment already had that structure and became the umbrella organization while volunteers built the program.
A similar thing happened when residents wanted trails at the city lake and when another group wanted to restore Pleasant Hill’s caboose. People had the ideas and were willing to work. Community Betterment helped give them a way to do it. “There’s just a number of things that we have used that 501(c)(3) for through the years,” Miller told the council.
But some of the organization’s work is much harder to see. Around 2010, local leaders learned there were Pleasant Hill children who were nutritionally at risk, Myra Doehla said. The community wanted something similar to the Harvesters backpack program, which provides food for children to take home when they aren’t at school.
There was a problem. According to Doehla, Pleasant Hill didn’t meet the requirements for Harvesters to operate the program here at the time. The Pleasant Hill Optimist Club’s response was pretty simple. “Fine, we’ll do it ourselves,” Doehla recalled. And they did. The Optimist Club operated the program while Community Betterment provided the nonprofit structure that helped with donations and purchasing food. “That was what it was about because it really adds up when you’re buying thousands of dollars worth of food,” Doehla said.
She said the local effort continued for somewhere around eight to 10 years before Harvesters eventually became involved. It’s one of those stories that probably happened without most of Pleasant Hill ever knowing much about it.
Then there are the stories that have become part of the personality of Pleasant Hill. Years ago, the community wanted to offer horse-drawn carriage rides at Christmas. Miller said they initially hired someone from Holden to bring a horse and carriage to town. “It was just super expensive,” he said. “We could not afford it.” So Miller and Mark Randall came up with another idea. They would just buy a carriage.
“We put up our own money,” Miller said. They paid about $850 for it and then went back to Community Betterment hoping the organization would reimburse them. Miller joked about going back “on bended knee” to ask for the money. Community Betterment agreed. “And the rest is history,” Miller said. Decades later, the carriage rides are still part of Christmas in Pleasant Hill.
Community Betterment is also a property manager in Pleasant Hill. Doehla told the council that the organization rents space in the historic Depot as well as the old Booth library building, with rental income helping support Community Betterment’s work in the community.
The Depot has had an interesting role in Pleasant Hill’s downtown through the years. Miller said that when downtown had far more empty storefronts, the Depot spaces were intended in part to give new small businesses an affordable place to get started. “It started out as an incubator for a new small business,” Miller said. The idea was that a business could begin in the Depot, establish itself, and eventually move into a larger downtown location.
Today, downtown Pleasant Hill looks much different, but Community Betterment continues to manage the spaces. Doehla called the Depot “a wonderful, wonderful spot,” although she acknowledged that its age creates limitations on the types of businesses the building can accommodate.
The income from renting the Depot and old library building gives Community Betterment another way to continue supporting projects and ideas in Pleasant Hill. Those projects are part of the organization’s past and present. The question now is what its future will look like.
The people who helped build many of these projects aren’t getting younger, and Doehla was open with the council about the need for someone else to eventually take their place. “When we’re done, there has to be somebody to step in,” she said. “Or else guess what happens? You’re dead in the water, and we’re done.” Finding the next generation isn’t necessarily easy.
People are busy. They are working, raising children, caring for their parents, going to ball games, and trying to fit everything else into their lives. But Doehla said helping your community doesn’t mean you have to do everything. “You don’t have to do lots,” she said. “All you have to do is have something you are passionate about and get involved.”
Community Betterment board member Kylie Baker sees getting younger residents involved as an important part of the organization’s future. “We want younger citizens to be involved to one day pass down the torch,” Baker told the council. That may be the larger story behind more than 30 years of Community Betterment.
“Community Betterment is about bringing people together to turn community ideas into lasting improvements,” Baker said. More than 30 years later, many of those improvements are still here. Some have become so familiar that we probably don’t even think about the people who made them happen.
The question now is who will come up with the next idea and who will care enough about Pleasant Hill to help make it happen. The People Behind the Projects: Community Betterment Looks to the Next Generation.
Current board for Community Betterment:
President: Terry Wilson, Pleasant Hill Historical Society
Vice President: Myra Doehla, Pleasant Hill Optimist Club
Treasurer: Amy Johnson, City of Pleasant Hill
Secretary: Martha Drasny, Pleasant Hill Historic District
Suzanne Brenneman, Pleasant Hill School District
Kylie Baker, City of Pleasant Hill
Mark Guffey, citizen
Randy Miller, citizen
Tina Stidham, Pleasant Hill Chamber of Commerce