Community Organizing & Resident Support

Nuestra’s Organizing & Resident Services department began to transform itself this past fall to provide a greater level of all-around service to the community. For years, resident support staff predominantly worked one-on-one with tenants living in our properties. The staff, working closely with the new Executive Director, created new strategies to address the rapidly changing community needs. One decision was to focus community stabilization efforts within the Dacia FIT area, which is in effect “ground zero” for the current economic crisis within our communities. Additionally, Nuestra restructured the department around the following initiatives: using social networking principles to engage small groups of residents in designing initiatives to solve local concerns; community safety organizing to address the effects of foreclosures; and curriculum development and management of our community learning centers based on needs identified by residents through surveys and focus groups. This restructuring of initiatives is now accomplishing two goals: providing an increasingly perceptive understanding and grass-roots support network regarding the social fallout in the Dacia FIT area from the foreclosure and economic crisis; and providing a broader spectrum of services as requested by the community.

Within the Dacia FIT area, Nuestra’s first new initiative is social network organizing. Using the NeighborCircle model developed by Lawrence CommunityWorks, Nuestra brings together 10 to 12 families in a series of dinners each hosted by a resident. These dinners allow residents an opportunity to tell their family stories and build relationships. Through facilitated discussions during these dinners, residents discuss concerns facing their neighborhood and design a plan to take action on a particular issue. Over time, this strategy will build numerous small groups engaged in self-designed organizing. This process allows Nuestra staff to refer participants to resources helpful to their families and to opportunities to engage in other Nuestra programs, leadership training and committees. Two small groups are already meeting in the first quarter of 2009 and two more will begin to convene in each succeeding quarter. In the last half of 2009, we will start to include groups in Nuestra properties outside the Dacia FIT area, starting with our 95-apartment Adams Court development in Mattapan, in order to institute this new social network organizing strategy more broadly across our service area.

The second organizing initiative in the Dacia FIT area is an issue campaign around public safety. When Nuestra staff canvassed the neighborhoods in the fall of 2008, crime quickly rose to the top as a priority requiring immediate action. Residents, real estate staff and organizing staff, including a teen working as a paid organizer, identified specific “hot spots” in the form of foreclosed, abandoned buildings that had become centers of drugs and prostitution. In organizing around these hot spots, our community organizing staff are forming new neighborhood watches, working closely with Boston Police, creating code enforcement strategies with the City’s Inspectional Services Department and collaborating with existing neighborhood associations and other local nonprofits. These efforts aim to ensure that the community removes squatters, drug dealers and prostitution from abandoned and vacant residences. As of the first quarter of 2009, specific properties have been identified and action plans are being designed for implementation throughout the year with the goal of removing drug dealing and prostitution from the target properties. One plan is for Nuestra to acquire and renovate target properties. An acquisition strategy is not likely for abandoned properties that are formerly foreclosed buildings acquired by speculators and remain vacant and blighted. For these, code enforcement and community pressure on owners to renovate their properties, or sell to a responsible owner, will be components of the action plan.

Nuestra’s third community organizing initiative within the Dacia FIT area is the enhancement of our two Ann and George Macomber community learning centers (CLCs). The Stafford Heights CLC located near the intersection of Blue Hill Avenue and Dudley Street provides more than just a safe space for adults and youth to congregate. With a learning center coordinator on staff, we offer extensive programming, from intergenerational activity classes to computer literacy and physical health courses, such as Tae Kwon Do and stretching for seniors. As noted, residents developed priorities that shape the curriculum. As a location with a free tutored walk-in computer lab and a continually growing series of courses, the learning center serves as a home-base for us within the community that extends beyond our offices in Dudley Square. It is a center where residents can acquire additional skills to increasingly become thriving, self-sufficient participants within the community. This facility, open six days a week, provides another key service that further completes the broad vision underlying Nuestra’s mission.

In 2009, we entered into a partnership with another local nonprofit, Teen Empowerment, to operate a new year-round youth program at our Howard-Dacia CLC located within the Dacia FIT area near the Blue Hill Avenue-Quincy Street intersection. Teen Empowerment, a leading youth-organizing nonprofit with over two decades of success, plans to hire up to eighteen youth within the Dacia FIT area to form a team that will significantly reduce gang activity and increase leadership and job opportunities in a community direly in need of these services. Entering into a formal partnership with Teen Empowerment provides necessary opportunities to the Dacia FIT area community while allowing Nuestra to focus on its core programs and strategies. Both organizations are able to perform their respective missions with increasing success through collaboration.

Looking beyond the Dacia FIT area, Nuestra’s Community Organizing & Resident Services department also conducts housing counseling through our Housing Stabilization Services (HSS) program. Each year, we provide counseling, intervention and mitigation services to over 100 members of the community. Even though this program is open to the general public, our primary focus is housing stabilization for the elderly and disabled. These two populations face a number of challenges, one of which is securing affordable housing. Because the elderly and disabled are not always aware or necessarily informed of their rights, housing advocacy and direct aid is needed to ensure many of these residents do not become homeless.

As noted in the example of action plans around foreclosed properties, Nuestra’s community organizing is critical as the primary conduit of neighborhood information to the entire organization. To have staff constantly serving as the eyes and ears of the organization ensures that our other departments are providing services that meet the community’s needs. In January 2009, for example, HUD awarded the Real Estate Development department $5.3 million in 202 funding to develop forty units of senior housing on Blue Hill Avenue within the Dacia FIT area. This project, called Quincy Commons, was significantly informed by elder members of the community working closely with our staff over a five year period. This development, scheduled for completion in 2011, is a strong example of the valuable multifaceted role community organizing is to our overall operations. As our social network organizing engages more residents in all of Nuestra’s activities, this conduit role will become increasingly important to our operations.