Eating fries with Will Cole-French

By Pedro Figueiredo

A tall and humorous fellow, I met with Will Cole-French at a diner located on Hancock Street when it was starting to get dark and a little chilly.

Will’s story began in urban Plainfield, New Jersey where he was born and raised until the age of 10. He then moved to Wisconsin, briefly, before moving to the golden coast. In Santa Rosa he attended high school and proceeded on to the University of California Santa Cruz, graduating in 88’.

Will married and moved to Boston in 97’, a place he calls home. Then received his Master’s Degree in Boston University and settled in Dorchester on March 2014. Before settled down, he earned experience living overseas and having to adapt to learn the different cultural elements associated within a place. He lived in Vietnam from 2004 to 2013.

“Some values learned in Vietnam helped me in civic associations,” said Will.

Cole-French is currently the president of the Hancock Street Civic Association, in which he leads the volunteer work to make a difference at the local level.

The association holds monthly meetings typically adjoining on the first Tuesday of the month. In the meetings, the community members converse about various different issues and other thoughts on what is happening around the neighborhood.

Will tells me how the legalization of cannabis has affected his own civic association, “That by far is the hot issue for civic associations in Boston. I hadn’t even put a sentence of thought into that until suddenly someone wanted to open a shop right here in the neighborhood.”

It is not just the legalization of cannabis that has led constituents to be on their toes. Transportation and the dangers that come with speeding cars has led people to advocate more on those issues. Will’s goal is to get his members expressing their beliefs and concerns of these issues and responding in a manner that is beneficial to the members of the community.

That is why the association holds face-to-face meetings, a “say it there, say it now” approach that gets people thinking of challenges the community is facing now and to quickly respond. Also, developers are required to meet with Civic Associations so that the city can engage with the neighborhood and establish a respectful bond with each other.

Dorchester is a hub for different ethnicities and nationalities. Among others, Will is very in-tune with the Vietnamese values and he knows the language well, which has made it very beneficial because of the significant Vietnamese population living in the neighborhood.

“There are so many ways of thinking that are built in a language,” Will told me while eating a French fry. In a civic association in Dorchester there is a mixture of languages, he told me that his association consisted of Cape Verdean, Haitian, different Hispanics, and Italian. Each nationality is rich with their own culture, food, and language. All living together in the same neighborhood on the same streets of Dorchester.

Civic engagement is beneficial to communities and the city because it gives voices to the locals who live there, those who are impacted the most. Will wants to continue his work with civic engagements and look to get more voices to be a part of the Hancock Street Civic Association so that there can be more positive changes to better the community in which we all live in.