By: Deborah Johnson Wood
After just two years, Grand Rapids-based Neighborhood Ventures has become a powerful engine driving economic redevelopment in the city's neighborhood business districts.
The nonprofit organization spun off from the Neighborhood Business Alliance in 2006 with just two staff and a board of directors. Today, two LISC AmeriCorps volunteers and a GVSU intern round out the team that is working diligently to revitalize neighborhood business districts.
"One of the cool things about Neighborhood Ventures is that since we started our first fiscal year in July 2006, every six months we've been able to add a new project," says Executive Director Kimberly Van Dyk.
When Van Dyk says "projects," she means projects with lots of programs associated with them, all geared to help business districts improve, add jobs, attract customers, and spur economic development.
Three current projects target revitalization in the Southtown, Uptown, and Burton Heights districts. A few of the programs available within each project are façade improvement incentives, business recruitment, business training and technical assistance, public infrastructure improvements, and district branding and marketing.
Clean Slate, piloted last summer, hired eight neighborhood teens who worked four days a week picking up trash and planting and maintaining public planters in the Franklin/Eastern business district.
"Our goal this year is to expand it to 20 teens and six business districts," Van Dyk says.
Neighborhood Ventures’ first fiscal year budget (July ’06 to June ‘07) was $180,000, all raised through grants and donations. This year, community support is enabling the group to bump its budget to $250,000.
Source: Kimberly Van Dyk, Neighborhood Ventures
Photograph by Brian Kelly
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Deborah Johnson Wood is the development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at [email protected].
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