LISC Helps Communities Transform

Hello, my name is Rhonda Catt and I am a LISC AmeriCorps member. The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) is dedicated to helping community residents transform distressed neighborhoods into healthy and sustainable communities of choice and opportunity — good places to work, do business, and raise children. LISC mobilizes corporate, government, and philanthropic support to provide to local community development organizations.

In 1994 LISC began its sponsorship of an AmeriCorps program as an additional strategy to help community development corporations (CDCs) help themselves. Members help promote volunteerism and civic engagement by encouraging neighbors to take active roles in helping to transform their communities.

LISC AmeriCorps members help to develop affordable housing and provide home ownership counseling to prospective first-time, low-income homebuyers. They also participate in community building activities in neighborhoods and with residents to form crime watches, neighborhood groups, tenants associations, and collaborations between local service providers. Members work with youth to provide opportunities to participate in sports, other recreation programs, and after school activities that include tutoring, homework assistance, and reading enrichment for underachieving students.

For my service year I have been assigned to the Edison Neighborhood Association in Kalamazoo. I administer several safety and community building programs such as starting block watch groups, organize neighborhood clean-ups, and develop a skills exchange program. My direct service days vary greatly from meetings with residents or local officials to discuss current safety issues to supervising several middle school students in a clean-up project.

Building Blocks is by far my favorite program. Neighbors along the same street come together and help each other plan and work on exterior home improvement projects; to do so they share a small grant for materials and supplies. The families vote on what projects will be done and how much of the grant will be spent on each project. This is a wonderful community program that builds social capital by involving all the neighbors to complete the projects; it also builds structural capital by the projects that are done to the home. I have seen a street transform from neighbors who don’t know each other with their front yard in shambles to a cohesive neighborhood where they take pride in where they live and who they live next to.