Chad Rowekamp’s path to becoming a leader in his neighborhood and community began with a simple question: Why aren’t the bathrooms at the park open?

The Eau Claire resident asked himself that question about 10 years ago on a visit with his two young children to Boyd Park, which is not far from his home in the city’s Eastside Hill Neighborhood. Irked by the lack of bathroom access, Chad attended the next meeting of the Eastside Hill Neighborhood Association.

“I went and said, ‘Why are the bathrooms locked?’ And they said, ‘That’s the city policy,’ and I said, ‘Well, we’re going to get that changed.’ ”

Soon, Chad was elected to the association’s Steering Committee and was working to raise funds for security cameras and other improvements that would allow for the bathrooms to be opened. The effort’s ultimate success inspired Chad and other neighbors to take on bigger projects that have benefited the community in big and small ways. 

For the past decade, Chad has served on the association’s Steering Committee, most of that time as the group’s president. He acknowledges that he used to be shy, but that’s changed over the years as he’s found himself in front of news cameras for a number of projects.

Among those projects was a personal one: creating a Little Free Sled Library at Seven Bumps Hill, a popular sledding spot next to Forest Hill Cemetery. Inspired by an item he saw online, during the winter of 2021 Chad and his son crafted a sled rack out of wood and stocked it with plastic sleds. “We just put it up, we didn’t actually ask,” he said with a grin. “It got retroactively approved.” The simple, neighborly act attracted media attention – including an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered – and inspired imitators elsewhere. (“Good ideas are meant to be replicated,” Chad says.)

The sled library began with 12 sleds, and Chad says it has never ended a winter with fewer than 12 sleds in it. “I hear people say all the time, ‘If that was in my town, they’d get stolen or broken.’ At Seven Bumps, they do break – they’re plastic sleds,” Chad says. “But people drop off new sleds or snowboards.”

The sled library is a good fit for the neighborhood, which also features a free produce stand and dozens of book-filled Little Free Libraries, many of which were also built by Chad. “It’s all kind of a concept of sharing and building community,” he says.

And building community can mean pulling together disparate groups of neighbors to work toward common goals. Consider the Boyd Park Plus project, a successful years-long effort to create a new skatepark, a new playground, and more at the park. Raising funds for (and now maintaining) those assets involved collaboration among the neighborhood association, the Eau Claire Skaters Association, Prairie Partners of Eau Claire, several Master Gardeners, and others. Chad says he finds himself feeling validated when he visits the park and counts the number of people enjoying it.

“Success is that people are down at the park and they’re using it, and with success comes even more success,” he says. “There used to be a lot of graffiti and vandalism at Boyd Park, and there used to be some drug issues, and virtually all that has gone away because there’s more (park) users.”

Chad believes firmly in working to create a place where you want to live.

“At the end of the day, you don’t have to move to a new neighborhood to live in a better place,” Chad says. “We all have that opportunity to contribute to make our neighborhoods better. The only currency that we’re paying for a lot of it is time. You don’t need dollars, necessarily.”

That time may mean volunteering in the park, or it may mean meeting with city officials or sitting through committee meetings to make sure projects get the necessary approvals and support from local government.

“When I approach the city, I always tell them, ‘Don’t tell me no, just tell me how.’ I get that there’s limitations on what we can do,” Chad explains. “If I want to build a million-dollar feature in a park in a neighborhood, the city’s not going to have that in their budget. But if I came to them and I had a path on finding a sponsor or raising the money, then they’re going to be open to it.”

Chad continues: “I’ve always been stubborn. … When people tell me ‘no,’ if that’s not what I want to hear, I’m going to find my work-around. There’s solutions to everything, and a lot of times they’re better than what we’re doing.”

And finding those solutions, Chad believes, often begins with simply showing up – like he did at that neighborhood meeting a decade ago. He encourages everyone who wants to make change where they live to join their neighborhood association or consider forming one. “You want a better park? You want your road safer with more crosswalks? This is how you advocate for the place you live,” he says.

And Chad has plenty of ideas to continue improving the place he lives, such as installing lights at Seven Bumps Hill, putting a mural in the bike tunnel at Boyd Park, and providing input on the Plank Hill Master Plan, which may lead to the creation of a new park. Ultimately, such improvements depend on the participation of neighbors like himself.

“At the end of the day, you have to make a choice: Do I want to be lazy or do I want to make change?” he explains.