Article
Ms. Pricilla is the sixth generation of her family to live in the home where she grew up. She has since raised her children there, and her grandchildren come to visit frequently. Mr. Priscilla was just one of the many people I heard speak at a recent ceremony for the Eastern North Philadelphia Sustainable Communities Initiative (SCI), which engages residents in creating a vision and action plan for their neighborhoods. One by one, and with a great sense of accomplishment and pride, residents, business owners, pastors, and community leaders that live and work in this area of 13,000 residents happily went to the podium to share the portions of the “Our Community, Our Ideas,” plan, the result of a year of work. The meetings, many of them lasting into the night, were coordinated by Asociacion Puertorriquenos en Marcha through a Knight Foundation grant to Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC).
