Neighborhoods@Work

Professor Steven Goldsmith of Harvard focuses a chapter on Neighborhoods@Work in his new book - The Power of Social Innovation: How Civic Entrepreneurs Ignite Community Networks for Good. Attached is an excerpt about the League by Professor Goldsmith.

League President & CEO Blair Taylor visited the KTLA Morning News for Black History Month. Blair discussed National Urban League's 100th Anniversary and the pending 2010 State of Black LA Report with Michaela Pereira, Mark Kriski, Sam Rubin, and Jessica Holmes. Talk also included Obama Administration's focus on supporting holistic neighborhood change models like League's Neighborhoods@Work and the hope that South LA is selected to receive the significant federal funding.

The report for Year 2 of the Los Angeles Urban League's Neighborhoods@Work initative is now available. From Chief Neighborhood Officer Pamela Bakewell:

The Neighborhoods@Work Report for Year Two includes an overview of our work from July 2008 through June 2009. We are proud to report our key accomplishments and key learnings to date, which demonstrate how we are “moving the needle”—the theme of this report. In Year One, we concentrated our efforts on infrastructure development; in Year Two, we implemented integrated activities and programs to achieve measurable impact in each of the five disciplines—Education, Employment, Health, Housing and Safety. In Year Two, we also moved further into the evaluation process of our model. We engaged experts who helped design intricate logic models for each discipline. We are excited to share a key learning of our work which indicated the need to develop a strategic approach to outreach. This resulted in the decision to add a sixth discipline in Year Three—Community Engagement and Outreach.

Two years ago, civic leaders in south Los Angeles started an integrated social service program for improving literacy and job-career readiness in an impoverished neighborhood of about 10,000 people.

Today, program sponsors are looking to close a key gap in coverage – a lack of broadband and internet access that not only inhibits adults getting and retaining good jobs but also presents big educational challenges to the area’s youth.

“There’s a technology access gap that continues to persist today in urban communities across America,” said Blair Taylor, president of the L.A. Urban League, which launched the Neighborhoods@Work program in 2006. “We are convinced that a large part of the income disparity and educational issues can be bridged, if we are able to get timely information to people in low-income communities,” he said.

Senior VP Trevor Ware talked about MTA's plan for light rail along the Crenshaw Corridor in today's issue of the LA Times:

"Look at the transportation options that we have now," said Trevor Ware, chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Urban League. "We have buses on Crenshaw and we see other neighborhoods that are developing other types of transportation options. To have a decision made that we will have light rail -- that's so much faster and will have so much more of an economic impact -- we need that too."