Temple University in Philadelphia has picked two
Kalamazoo Community Foundation projects to be a part of the school's national intitiative to create opportunities for young and old to live and work together.
Local residents and the foundation worked for more than a year to figure out how to foster connections across generations and to develop projects based on what they learned.
The acceptance from Temple's Intergenerational Center, which administers the Communities for All Ages, CFAA, project, will help those projects go forward. Specific programs to be implemented are in Comstock Township and the Northside neighborhood of Kalamazoo.
It also brings dollars to implement the projects.
Each will receive a $20,000 grant for each of the next two years for a total of $40,000.
Temple is supplying half and the Community Foundation matches it.
The two projects came about after a lot of ground work at the neighborhood level.
Team members went door-to-door in specific number of blocks on the Northside. They found people worried that some youngsters are not ready to take advantage of the Kalamazoo Promise when they graduate from high school, says Amy Slancik, of the Kalamazoo Community Foundation.
A project working with middle school students in an Alternative Middle School connected with New Genesis Learning Center has been proposed.
The hope is that the experience gained here will be applied to other communites, says Carrie Pickett-Elway, of the Kalamazoo Community Foundation.
In Comstock Township, the teams on the project suggested the development of a Community Service Corp to build connections among residents who did not feel connected to their neighbors and who did not know how to connect to availablw services. One possibility is that the Community Service Corp be located in the Comstock Commuity Learning Center. The center is slated for renovation this summer.
Work on the two projects is ongoing.
The Kalamazoo Community Foundation is one of six community foundations working on the CFAA initiative. The work was in part made possible by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, based in Battle Creek. In total, CFAA works with 25 urban and rural communities to promote the well-being of all age groups.
Writer: Kathy Jennings
Sources: Amy Slancik, Community Investment Officer, Initiatives, and Carrie Pickett-Erway, Senior Community Investment Officer, Kalamazoo Community Foundation
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