Finding the Right Formula
Our Strategies
Strategies for Success
While public and private partnerships in Dayton invested heavily in public infrastructure, built 26 schools, constructed new or renovated libraries, and possesses excellent arts and cultural venues–distressed neighborhoods are still struggling. The City of Dayton invested American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding in support of Black and Brown business, community capital projects, digital equity fiber optic inventories, housing, and neighborhood projects. The City of Dayton passed a levy that offers preschool for four year old children and now three year old children. However, much city funding, by necessity, goes to maintaining lots vacated when blighted structures were demolished, policing, paving and repairing streets and bridges, and many other tasks to support life in Dayton as a “status quo.”
Unfortunately, these funds are not enough to form comprehensive solutions to economic disinvestment and systemic racism and discrimination. Dayton partnerships have developed projects with low income housing tax credits, mixed use housing, recreation and cultural improvements, additions to business districts, and Greater Dayton Premier Management is actively working on removing old public housing units and moving to project-based housing subsidies. However, efforts do not touch all neighborhoods and many need additional supports.
The City of Dayton has a commitment to engaging youth, but possesses limited funds and few opportunities for students to be anything other than service recipients or passive consumers of education. This initiative engages youth front and center in decision making about neighborhood planning, new infill housing development, energy efficient housing rehabs, public art and place-making activities, and coordinating violence solution and peace-making activities with neighborhood, police, city, and nonprofit leadership.
Students will be involved in paid internships in high school and college where they will be engaged in voicing their experience and ideas as well as collecting and analyzing data, developing clear messages about projects in social media and word-of-mouth with neighbors, coordinating activities, researching solutions and policies that worked in other communities, and developing local recommendations with neighborhood leaders, government staff and officials, community agencies, and systems.
Through housing development and neighborhood revitalization, peacemaking and interventions that reduce juvenile and adult crime, out-of-home placements, increased tax base from expanded housing, and greater educational attainment, we believe that money can be shifted into proactively addressing needs. The goal is to reduce use of expensive services, like juvenile detention, Department of Youth Services incarceration, and adult incarceration, while transferring these funds into distressed neighborhoods, families, and individuals.
Read more about educational attainment, neighborhood housing and projects, and peacemaking.
