Revitalizing Communities

The practical advice, research, and case studies shared here are intended as resources for communities and organizations engaged in revitalization efforts.

Practical Resources

Needle-Moving Collective Impact: Three Guides to Creating an Effective Community Collaborative

These three guides—Community Collaborative Life Stages, Capacity and Structure, and The Next Generation of Community Participation—provide tactical pathways for community collaboratives to increase their chances of success.

Planning a Promise Neighborhood Guide

Creating a Promise Neighborhood means committing to break a vicious, intergenerational cycle of poverty and give poor children a real opportunity to achieve long-term success. Planning such an initiative means bringing together community members, schools, nonprofit organizations, funders, and many other stakeholders in a coordinated effort. Five critical questions can help nonprofit organizations and their partners focus on the issues that matter most to an initiative's success.

Research and Case Studies

Needle-Moving Community Collaboratives: A Promising Approach to Addressing America's Biggest Challenges

Community collaboratives aspire to do more with less by enlisting participants from every sector to work together toward a common goal. This report shares lessons from 12 needle-moving collaboratives that have made tremendous gains. These diverse efforts offer enormous promise to bring about broader, more lasting change across the nation.

Next Generation Community Revitalization: A Work in Progress

A new wave of efforts designed to break the cycle of poverty and revitalize distressed communities is attracting attention and support from every segment of society. This report highlights six emerging national networks that show potential to outperform their predessors, explores what makes them work, and warns of the risks that could make these efforts fail.

Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ): Transforming the organization while scaling up in a tightly defined local service area

The Harlem Children’s Zone is committed to ensuring all children—aged 0-18—living in the “Zone” make a successful transition to healthy, independent adulthood. This case study explores how its leaders made the strategic decision to focus the entire organization on this transformative goal.

Communities of Opportunity: Making Opportunity Knock--A Strategy for Transforming San Francisco's Southeastern Neighborhoods

To make good on a long legacy of unfulfilled political promises to revitalize its distressed southeastern quadrant, San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom and his leadership team set about creating an ambitious plan to align efforts of city agencies, city-funded community-based organizations and private philanthropy to deploy city resources most effectively.