In 2013, Prosperity Indiana began a multi-year partnership with the Legacy Foundation of Lake County to design a program that uses a neighborhood-based collective impact approach to strengthen communities from within -- through organizing, planning and decision-making and action. Four years later, the Legacy Foundation Neighborhood Spotlight program has seen four communities bring about transformation in local places, as residents, nonprofit organizations, and businesses came together to learn, plan, and implement change in their neighborhoods block-by-block.
Prosperity Indiana received an initial grant from the Knight Fund of the Legacy Foundation to facilitate the design of the Neighborhood Spotlight program in collaboration with the Legacy Foundation staff and board members. The Prosperity Indiana Capacity Building Team then worked with the inaugural communities, Hobart Northwest and the Gary-Miller Creative Arts District, to build the capacity of local stakeholders and coordinate collective impact planning efforts within each. Because of the program’s success, the JP Morgan Chase Foundation awarded Prosperity Indiana a grant to support the program and provide the same support to two additional communities, Gary’s Emerson neighborhood and the Town of Griffith, in 2016.
Now that all four communities are in the implementation phase of their plans, the excitement continues to build as participants see the projects that they organized around, decided on and are acting upon coming to fruition. Many of these projects are prime examples of what can happen when “a cross-section of community members work collaboratively and collectively on improving quality of life”.
The Gary-Miller Creative Arts District, one of the Spotlight communities, has been bustling with activity, completing so many of the action steps and goals of their quality of life plan that they’ve continued on to set new goals and objectives to accomplish.
Miller Community Builder Jessie Renslow says, “Community buy-in has made these projects hugely successful since they are community-sourced programs.”
Much of Renslow’s work has been to bring stakeholders together to get things done collaboratively instead of competing with one another.
“Because of Miller Spotlight, we’ve formed a lot of partnerships we couldn’t have had on our own.”
One project sparked by the identified strengths and needs of the community is a small business incubator and co-working space, The Stage (pictured on the right). Since its soft launch on February 12, 2017, this newly reclaimed community space has sprung to life with pop-up shops, business and financial literacy workshops, and other community gatherings to further the efforts of the Miller Neighborhood Spotlight work groups and connect fledgling local entrepreneurs with resources to strengthen their chances for success.
In an article by Dezimon Alicea of The Gary Crusader, Stage Manager Gretchen Sipp shared the community’s vision for the space. She said, “The hope is that “The Stage” will provide a platform for emerging entrepreneurs, freelancers, small business owners, creatives, and the community as a whole to gain knowledge, build a social foundation, and turn their purpose into profit while building and supporting our city.”
Community builder Jessie Renslow (left) with Gretchen Sipp, manager of The Stage, a new small business incubator in Miller
Meanwhile, in another Spotlight community close to Miller, part of the Gary Downtown-Emerson neighborhood’s audacious plan is to turn this blighted area into an eco-district. Pastor Curtis Whittaker, Executive Director of FAITH CDC, the convening organization for Emerson’s Neighborhood Spotlight, said that the planning process was valuable in that it “forced doers to step back to create a vision and plan for moving forward.”
He added, “We’re grateful for the opportunity to see what the goal is and the steps to complete that goal.”
For Emerson, the Neighborhood Spotlight process has been “instrumental in pulling people together to get things done.”
This has been transformational for a neighborhood that had experienced planning burnout because its residents felt that many of the City’s plans had not come to fruition. The grassroots process that Neighborhood Spotlight provided allowed residents to see progress through early action projects and to build community and hope for the future of their neighborhood.
One of these tangible beacons of change in the Emerson neighborhood has been FAITH Farms. Burgeoning on the former site of two abandoned houses are crops of herbs and vegetables (pictured on the right). Currently tended to by a mixture of two paid staff, students receiving spending money for the summer and upcoming school year, and community volunteers, members of this urban farm crew are building agricultural skills as they plant, tend, weed, and harvest their crops. A farm stand is set up to allow neighbors to purchase fresh produce within walking distance of where they live. The group is also working with Purdue Extension to acquire an EBT machine, so that neighbors receiving SNAP benefits can use their food stamp dollars to make purchases. The long-term vision for the neighborhood includes expansion into closed loop systems like hydroponics and having an urban agricultural center where residents can learn about topics like nutrition and urban farming. The hope is that by becoming an eco-district they can create job opportunities and stabilize the community by attracting new residents and decreasing the number of blighted properties.
Planning for collective impact that leads to community transformation takes time and investment from a variety of stakeholders. Seeing the progress that each community has made to improve quality of life for themselves and their neighbors, through initiatives like Neighborhood Spotlight, is an incredible reward that reaches well beyond the time that the Prosperity Indiana team spends with resident leaders and community stakeholders. To learn more about collective impact and the framework we use for comprehensive community development, visit the Resource Library on our website.
To learn more about the Neighborhood Spotlight program and explore each community’s plan for collective impact, visit the Legacy Foundation’s website.
