My Philly Neighbor: Meet Germantown civic leader Marie-Monique Marthol
In this first edition of a Broke in Philly-adjacent reporting series about unsung community leaders, the Pomona Cherokee Civic Council’s president describes people as the neighborhood’s greatest resource.
The Pomona Cherokee Civivc Council. Photo courtesy of Maria-Monique Marthol.
The most important resource in Marie-Monique Marthol’s home of Germantown is the people. That caring and that concern about each other, she said, manifest themselves into some really concrete ways through the neighborhood’s historic civic council.
Marthol, the president of Pomona Cherokee Civic Council, which seeks to improve the quality of life in the Germantown area, has lived in Germantown since 2007 and owns her home. What interested her about the neighborhood was that many people of color who live in Germantown are homeowners and have raised their families in the community for years.
The older adults who grew up in the neighborhood were children where they reside now, Marthol said, and their parents and grandparents owned those houses.
“That exchange, that sharing of information about what used to be and so on is not just a historic document or something to read about,” she said. “The people here are living historical records and can tell us about things that happened in the neighborhood and what it looked like and how it felt to grow up here — that it was a good place to grow up, and [that] even through challenging times, people stayed.”
When Marthol was new to Germantown, the Pomona Cherokee Civic Council was an active civic organization, but many of the older neighbors who started it or was involved with it passed away, which left it lying dormant for a few years.
Dominique “Peak” Johnson is a North Philadelphia journalist and is one of the founding editors of the North Philly Metropolis. Currently, Peak practices kickboxing, freelances for Generocity.org, and occasionally tweets about “The Walking Dead.” Click here to learn more about Peak.
