The village in the middle of Bucharest. How some parents in Sector 1 built a community for their children

Elena Lucaci, the founder of the “Parents of Cireșari” community, is the mother of two children and lives in the neighborhood around the Cireșari Sports Base, in Sector 1 of Bucharest. In 2018, when she was preparing to give birth to her second child, she was increasingly feeling the challenges of parenthood in a crowded and less family-friendly city. Like many other parents, he was discovering that not only were solutions to everyday problems lacking, but also people with whom to share them.

Daily outings to the park and playground brought her into contact with other parents who lived just a few blocks away but whom she had never met. They quickly discovered they had the same questions, the same worries, and the same sense that the neighborhood life they remembered from childhood—with neighbors who knew each other and children growing up together—had become increasingly difficult to find.

From these meetings was born the community “Parents of Cherry Trees”, first a group of parents, then an NGO that gradually grew, beyond playgroups and meetings between neighbors. Today, the community organizes family events, neighborhood festivals, tours, parties, barbecues and civic projects that try to make the city safer for children. They campaigned for the reopening of the Cireșarii Sports Base, they taught drivers from several sectors to turn off the car engine when they are waiting for their children to get out of school or kindergarten, they planted trees, asked for markings on pedestrian crossings and, over time, built a support network between parents in the neighborhood.

In this interview, the founder of the community talks about today's urban childhood, the pressure parents feel, the disappearance of the sense of community and the “village” they built in the middle of the city. Elena Lucaci tells how urban experiences with children turn parents into “activists” involved in rewriting the rules, precisely to improve the lives of families and children today.

“I felt like I had lost something that many of us had as children”

How did “Parents of Cherry Trees” come about? When did you feel the need for such a community?
Elena Lucaci: It was kind of frustrating that the neighbors would only say “Hello” if I was in front of the gate. If we crossed paths at the market, we became like any stranger. I wanted to change that because I felt we had lost something that many of us had as children: the idea of ​​a village where everyone knows everyone.

And motherhood came with many challenges. In 2018, I was pregnant with my second child, overwhelmed and exhausted, seeing and feeling the dysfunctionality of the city, and worst of all, I had no one to tell all of this to. But, by an unsuspected luck, we gathered at the playground several mothers with similar values, with children of almost the same age, and we were a support for each other.

The civic side caught me more and I had proposed to take steps to reopen the Cireșarii Sports Base, an enormous resource of our community: 33,000 square meters of green space, with sports fields, closed at the time. That was the moment when I proposed to extend the connection we had in the park to the whole neighborhood.

Read the rest of the interview HERE.