Community Building and Organizing
NeighborWorks Week 2009
The Community Building and Organizing (CBO) program is dedicated to helping local residents increase their collective capacity to improve quality of life for individuals who live, work or worship in McLean County, Livingston County, and surrounding outlying areas.
CBO goals are achieved by working with residents and stakeholders to organize neighborhood meetings, tracking Community Level Outcomes, and providing additional training to residents who have been identified as leaders to increase their effectiveness.
Currently Community engagement is administering a neighborhood satisfaction survey in West Bloomington, Il and funding the STRONG project that works with female leaders of Bloomington’s Sunny Side and Holton Homes public housing resident’s councils.
Current Community Engagement activities include:
- Resident Leader Identification/Training program: Resident leaders are actively identified to provide additional training and support in the greater effort to improve the CLO target area and West Bloomington as a whole in a collaborative manner.
- Success Measures Project: The Success Measures project is a ground level, resident driven, needs assessment of targeted West Bloomington neighborhoods. The success measures project addresses four key strategic initiatives areas. 1) Connect program and services to client needs, 2) Develop human resources,3) Increase awareness in the greater community of both the challenges and resources available to address resident needs; and 4) Diversify resources available to adequately address unmet needs.
- Community Level Outcomes: The Community Level Outcomes data tracking effort consists of : data tracking and analysis of crime, housing stock, foreclosure rates, and code violations in our CLO target area as defined by the Neighborworks America grant. CLO activities extend to include pro-active community engagement activities in order to positively affect the quality of life within the CLO and the broader West Bloomington community. Social media is leveraged for greatest impact. Asset mapping via google maps
- Volunteer recruitment and Coordination: In conjunction with community engagement activities volunteers are recruited and leveraged to increase the impactfullness of community engagement efforts. Volunteers are at the heart of the success measures project and also serve as photographers/recorders of community activities.
- Community Engagement Internship: One Community Engagement intern is currently working to conduct in-depth research on the Success Measures Project, along with in-depth analysis of data collected for the Community Level Outcomes project.
Contact: Gena Glover at genag@mccainc.org or 309-834-9245
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