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CURRENT
GRANT PROJECTS
place
matters
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The United Way of Greater
Cincinnati recently launched the Place Matters Initiative, a place-based
investment strategy to achieve breakthrough change in the Greater
Cincinnati neighborhoods of Avondale, Covington and Price Hill.
The United Way turned to the Community Building Institute to help
facilitate the development and management of community investment
plans in the three neighborhoods. Each investment plan requires
the input and broad participation of neighborhood residents, associations
and institutions.
EVANSTON
NOW!
The community of Evanston wanted to figure out a way to get more
residents active and engaged in the revitalization of the neighborhood.
The Community Building Institute worked with residents to create
EvanstoNow!, a neighborhood-led movement dedicated to connecting
the gifts, skills and talents of Evanston residents to exciting
volunteer opportunities in the neighborhood. In three months,
residents recruited more that 100 volunteers.
DO
RIGHT CAMPAIGN
The Center for Closing the Health Gap and the community of Walnut
Hills wanted to launch a new health initiative in the neighborhood.
They partnered with the Community Building Institute to create
the Do Right Campaign, a neighborhood effort to reduce obesity.
The campaign involved the creation of small working groups that
would conduct research on obesity issues in the neighborhood and
use these findings to create responsive programming. The campaign
was such a success in Walnut Hills that the model was adopted
by a neighboring community.
COMMUNITY
CLUSTERS PROJECT
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The
Community Building Institute's Community Cluster analysis is intended
to provide a framework for collaboration for the many and varied
communities in Hamilton County, including Cincinnati and its neighborhoods.
This work is a response to the many studies and debates that have
taken place in the region in the past decade about regionalism.
Business leaders, planners, and public policy analysts seem to
agree that creating an environment of more collaborative decision
making and shared government action make sense in this region.
There has yet to be a framework that seems to resonate with the
communities that make up the region. We hope that this cluster
analysis will provide such a framework.
Rather
than think of Hamilton County as one metropolitan area that needs
to act in unison we asked how do people and businesses use this
region? Which parts of the region share markets and resources
and problems? What are the parts of the region that have shared
histories and culture? How do real people view and use this place?
As we thought about those questions and attempted to answer them
a framework began to emerge. If you combined a traditional planning
approach with a more non-traditional evaluation of how people
conduct their personal lives and use a place you can create some
very meaningful groupings or clusters of communities. These clusters
of communities share housing markets, people go to the same shopping
centers and grocery stores, and they send their children to the
same schools. People tend to know people who live in the neighborhoods
and communities that surround them. These groups of communities
also share transportation and development patterns. When communities
understand the relationship between them and see the stake they
have in common issues it is much more likely that they will find
ways to collaborate.
This
is the general thinking behind the analysis of Hamilton County
we used to create this framework of 11 clusters of communities
that share common assets, issues, and development history. Each
of these clusters has interrelated housing markets, school districts,
and shopping trade areas. They are served by common hospitals
and health care providers. They also have land use and transportation
patterns that create relationships and shared interests.
We
have also used existing research created by several respected
academic, planning and public policy organizations to discuss
these clusters. The Myron Orfield study commissioned by Citizens
for Civic Renewal, the Hamilton County Compass Plan, and the Social
Areas of Cincinnati work by Maloney and Affery all provide great
insight into this region and how these clusters contribute to
the overall health and development of Hamilton County.
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