A place for date night. Cleaning up a local park. What’s coming soon to our streets.
Photography by Yuvie Styles
These are the posts you can find from Wynnewood neighbor Paola Goné on her Instagram page @hello_oakcliff, which she launched in November. She became curious about all the hidden gems of our neighborhood after moving here and often found herself answering those questions for friends when they visited.
“You know, if people are already asking me, why not create a space where I can share everything in one place? And everybody (online) was talking about North Dallas, McKinney, Uptown … just highlighting Bishop Arts, but not Oak Cliff,” she says. “So since I live here and I love the neighborhood, I was like, ‘I want to create something, (I) want to create the space for Oak Cliff.’”
Originally from Veracruz, Mexico, Goné says she took the opportunity to move to Texas through a role that opened up in her company.
She started her time in the U.S. working in logistics, and now she works as a project manager for the same turbomachinery company. Day to day, she coordinates with worldwide customers and across departments to upgrade machines that provide electricity to their clients.
When Goné first came to our city, she lived in Uptown and then East Dallas. Once she decided to buy a home, she started looking in North Dallas.
“And then, I kept receiving houses from Oak Cliff, from South Dallas, and I was like, ‘Brand new houses?’” she says. “Wait a minute, I hear that South Dallas, it’s supposed to not be good, but I’m seeing all these houses, right?”
Photography by Yuvie Styles
The recommended homes inspired her to come check out our neighborhood for herself. On her drive, she came across new restaurants, historic places and schools that she hadn’t known about before.
“Just to be 10 minutes from Downtown, five minutes away from the zoo, I was like, ‘This is perfect,’” she says. “I mean, this is an investment, and this is where I want to raise my kids, especially because I know that Oak Cliff is very diverse, and that’s what I wanted for my kids, for my family.”
The family settled down in Wynnewood about four years ago. She says her two boys often say, “Mama, we have everything here.”
Going out into the community, whether to dinners or happy hours, is often how her family spends their time.
She says she went into the social media world without any prior experience of content creation or social media management and now works with a coach to help showcase her perspective of the neighborhood.
“I look for strategies because every post that you see in Hello Oak Cliff, it’s from my own experience, from my own creation, because I wanted to be the voice of Oak Cliff in my own words,” she says.
One aspect of her social media strategy is focusing on certain pillars when it comes to her content creation, such as spotlighting “coming soon” developments and hidden gems.
Goné says she has especially enjoyed getting to meet new people through her platform. Not only does she find opportunities to collaborate, but collaborators have now become her friends, helping her to support the community.
“I want to show Dallas … everything that this neighborhood has,” she says. “That it’s not about, ‘Oh, it’s the hood or all the bad reputation.’ It’s just there’s so many good things here, the diversity, the cultural things, the restaurants, and also all the effort that those local businesses, the business owners, are doing to invest here.”
