NextDoor & H&R Block "Make Every Block Better" campaign

When I was involved in urban revitalization advocacy in DC, I used to describe my efforts as wanting to make every block better, across the city.

NextDoor is an online web platform focused on neighborhoods.  To join you have to be vetted by address, and generally, you can't cross post across neighborhoods, depending on the permissions set up for the application within particular cities.  Obviously, H&R Block is a big accounting/tax preparation firm.

The "Make Every Block Better" campaign awards small amounts of monies to neighborhood projects across the country.  The current webpage lists the 2022 recipients.  Most of the projects seem to be related to community park improvement.

Past winners:

-- 2021 winners
-- 2020 winners

It's nice that funding streams and programs exist to support such efforts.  Some cities have a form of neighborhood grants to do this kind of work as well.  More communities should do this because it's a great way to build community and civic engagement systems.

From a past blog entry recommending a detailed revitalization program for St. Louis:

Civic engagement.  After finding that top-down community improvement programs weren't successful in terms of retaining and attracting residents, in the late 1980s, Savannah began developing an approach to community improvement that complemented city improvement and nuisance abatement programs by engaging citizens as "designers of neighborhood programs and producers of community change," assisted by financing, capacity building and technical support from the city government.  

It's comparable to the point Rolf Goetze makes in Building Neighborhood Confidence, that the point of government assistance in revitalization isn't to foster dependence, but to provide the spark and help to get the community back to the point where it is (re)investing in itself.  

This is the reverse of how many city governments approach community improvement, and it is recommended that St. Louis adopt a civic engagement centric approach to community revitalization as part of this proposed program.

What Savannah did is described in detail in Leading by Stepping Back: A Guide for City Officials on Building Neighborhood Capacity, published in 1999. 

Ward Halls/Democracy House.  St. Louis has 28(!) wards and an Alderman for each.  I'd argue that given the population decline, they should shrink their Council.  

This has been proposed for Cleveland ("What would Cleveland look like with nine wards? Dramatically larger wards with diminished neighborhood identities," Cleveland Plain Dealer).  Imposed by the Province (political payback by someone who lost election for mayor but then became prime minister of the province), Toronto went from 47 wards to 25 in 2018.   Baltimore reduced the number of City Councilmembers by 3 in 2002, moving from six 3 member districts to 14 districts with one councilmember each and a Council President elected city-wide ("Too many districts? Not enough? Another bill introduced to reshape Baltimore City Council," Baltimore Sun).

In any case, in "Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda," calling it "Democracy House," I suggested that ward offices be created (not unlike ward/precinct halls in cities "back in the day") and that as part of the function, space and resources be provided to community groups involved in ward-specific activities.  Ward Democracy Houses should also include at least one annual "community organization fair" which could also serve as a volunteer recruitment event.

Funds for small projects.  A fund for small projects should be created for each ward, and the Participatory Budgeting process should be used to allocate funds ("An update on Participatory Budgeting practice in New York City," 2018).

Savannah's "Grants for Blocks" program was aimed at micro projects, providing micro grants ($500 was the maximum, today it would be about $1,000, with inflation), supporting house and community improvements without a great deal of bureaucracy.

Each year a "Neighborhood Convention" unveiled the projects to the community.

London has a similar grants program for sustainable mobility improvements.  Toronto used to have a program providing small grants to "Bicycle User Groups" to promote cycling as transportation

Citizen engaged planning practice.  (These are just some examples.)  What distinguished the Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program program is that it was citizen-led.  

Neighborhood groups had to come together to come up with and implement a program of community improvements.  The city developed a capacity building and training infrastructure to support it.

In DC, a great example is community-initiated urban design improvement planning by the Bloomingdale Civic Association in their Bloomingdale Village Center Project, which stepped in amidst the failure of the DC Office of Planning and Department of Transportation to pursue transformational planning approaches despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on community planning.

In Calgary, where neighborhood recreation centers are run by community organizations, the Federation of Calgary Communities provides technical support and an extensive schedule of training classes for community groups, including having urban planners on staff to assist neighborhoods dealing with difficult problems and new development  ("Community association planning committees a hidden gem?," Calgary Herald)

The Seattle Department of Neighborhoods sponsors a variety of programs where citizens undertake community projects with financial and training support from the city.  Unlike DC's "constituency service" programs by Councilmembers and the Mayor's Office, these initiatives are designed to support DIY self-help efforts driven independently of elected officials.  While out of date in terms of current programs, the book Neighbor Power describes the first couple decades of the program.

Models for technical assistance and capacity development

• Decades ago, there was an organization called the Nonprofit Support Center, which provided training in a number of cities, including DC.
• Dallas Public Library has an Urban Information Center with special information and publications on urban issues.
• The Massachusetts Citizen Planner Training Collaborative is a statewide training program for members of planning and zoning boards, but this concept can be extended to civic engagement more generally 
• The 1970-1980s Citizen Involvement Training Project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst produced training materials and workshops (not unlike the ABCD Institute
• The Project for Public Spaces produced a workbook, now in a second edition, called How to Turn A Place Around, which they also offered as a workshop.  It's a great model for urban design focused workshops for neighborhoods that can also be used as civic engagement training.
• Community Design Centers were a 1960s and 1970s initiative to provide urban design assistance to neighborhoods.  Funded by HUD, and typically based at universities, many communities still are served by such programs, as well as urban design studio programs for architecture and planning schools.
• The Chicago Bungalow Association is a great example of a historic preservation initiative focused on stabilizing neighborhoods through historic preservation.
• Park Pride, the city- and county-wide park support organization in Atlanta, sponsors an annual conference for park professionals and advocates (they need to do more to get park advocates to participate), which is a great way to communicate best practices and build the knowledge-base of the park community.  They also have a small grant program for friends of parks groups.