"I see what you are doing in the neighborhood and it's great! Keep up the good work. You are the cops with hearts."

Those words from an Olneyville, Rhode Island, resident brought tears to the eyes of the coordinators of the Olneyville Community and Police Alliance (CAPA) when they realized their hard work over the past two years was taking hold.

Robert E. Ansley, president, Orlando Neighborhood Improvement Corp.

Challenge: Our apartment communities lacked opportunities for leadership development and programming for at-risk youth. In part as a result, they suffered from a high crime rate.

Ken Lyons, President and CEO, NeighborWorks Home Solutions
                        

By Endya Watson, communications and outreach fellow

Coachella Valley Housing Coalition has discovered that partnering with "unlikely bedfellows" has multiple benefits for residents.

By Endya Watson, communications and outreach fellow

Coachella Valley Housing Coalition has discovered that partnering with "unlikely bedfellows" has multiple benefits for residents.

Utah is not yet a very diverse state; as of 2013, nearly 90 percent of residents were white. Latinos are a distant second at 13 percent, followed by Asian-Americans, Native Americans, blacks and Pacific Islanders (each less than 3 percent).
 

How do you engage youth in their communities, building character by connecting them to their area’s “roots”? It’s a challenge faced by all neighborhoods, and the Troy Rehabilitation & Improvement Progam (TRIP) has found a successful way to do it by partnering with two other community “anchors”: the local historical society and elementary school.

Imagine you’re in a new country. You’re still learning the language. You’re trying to figure out who runs things. You don’t have a lot of money. Meanwhile, however, you see things that aren’t fair and need to be changed. What do you do?

It’s said that tragedy shapes people—overwhelming them with pain or, at the other extreme, inspiring them to overcome the odds to serve as an inspiration for others. When Erika Cooper’s brother—her “best friend”—was murdered in a senseless gun fight when she was just 15, it looked at first like she would be among the defeated.