Impact of Neighboring - Findings

Neighboring helps children and youth succeed by providing opportunities, resources, and role models necessary to become successful adults.

Neighboring generates opportunities. Through programs that nurture through neighborhood-based caring connections, opportunities for children and youth expand. Some opportunities are formal. One leadership training program strengthens nonprofit boards, providing for institutional changes that affect children and families: “Graduates help make sure agencies serve clients. They have the life experience to make decisions about people.” Other Neighboring opportunities are not bound by the walls of an agency. When the doors close at a community center, the children, as a group, move to a neighborhood staff person’s home: “It is extended community.”

Neighbors helping neighborhood children

• Serving as tutors, mentors, and readers

• Providing meals, books, and child care assistance

• Assembling and donating small gifts

• Conducting workshops on healthy lifestyles and community issues

• Ensuring safe spaces for children to freely play and grow

Neighboring links resources and children. Resources travel by way of parents and guardians, with benefits spilling over to children. Child welfare agencies are invited to a block party to provide information and referral services to attendees, for instance. Tax assistance programs such as Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) are especially strong producers of external benefits from parents to children. Respondents noted, “Parents who get the income tax credit have more resources to support their children,” and “This frees up money to assist with things they need at home.”

Neighboring creates role models for children. Children “see caring and kindness modeled” when neighbors provide service. More importantly, when volunteers are people to whom children relate, the notion of “helping ourselves” becomes more possible, imbuing self-reliance. Parents become role models when they take an active role in their children’s life. Parenting classes and parental involvement opportunities are common. As with all Neighboring programs, the recipients of service (children) are also empowered to be service providers. Through their Neighboring experiences, children “gain a sense of pride,” “feel part of something bigger,” and become friends.

Neighboring changes the lines of accountability. The accountability to children in Neighboring is different than a traditional social service model. Parents and neighbors have a personal stake. “These are OUR children,” one volunteer noted, and then went on to say, “I love being around the people who helped my family grow up.” This sense of responsibility to children of the neighborhood is unwavering and transcends institutional boundaries.

Neighboring helps to improve the quality of the places in which the nation’s most vulnerable children and families live.

Neighboring gives power. Shaping the community agenda heightens individuals’ desire to engage and their self-efficacy. This resident involvement is “a long process” that often requires “time to educate people” to show them “they have power and they have a voice”; yet on all accounts, the dialogue indicates that benefits of capturing and using resident voice outweigh the costs. As one grantee stated, “When you spend that much time, there is a lot more buy-in. Things are more vetted out. ...They have a stake in it now.”

Neighboring connects neighbors. “We have open gym, but that is not going to change lives. It is the people met there that does,” was an example one volunteer used to illustrate that “programs are ways to create connections and relationships,” or the “things really valued in the neighborhood.” So while the programs are important, it is the “sense of family” and “camaraderie” cited by so many that speak to why a neighborhood approach works. By joining people in collective action, Neighboring helps people realize “they are not alone” and their neighbors “care” and “want success for everybody.” In this, they see “potential.”

Neighboring supplies leaders. As one long-time community activist said, “We don’t want to call on the same people all time. … This program brings new people. … It is extremely important that minorities are represented and that we create a long line of future leaders.” And youth earn leadership skills early on. As one Neighboring volunteer noted, “This taught me a lot about leadership roles and life lessons that I wouldn't have learned if I wasn't involved so early. It helped me stayed focused on doing the best I can for everyone around me and myself.”

Neighboring counts not only the people who self-select as leaders; numerous respondents referenced certain community members who unconsciously grew into leadership roles. “Sometimes people don't know that they started something and that they are the leader,” one respondent explained. Another resident volunteer helps to “break the ice” when volunteer groups arrive at seniors’ homes for painting and yard work.

Neighboring helps to provide low-income workers with the supports they need to get and keep good jobs and to build assets and savings.

Neighboring puts money into the pockets of low-income workers. Through tax assistance programs, low-income people receive real resources. Resident volunteers involved in tax preparation tended to view it as not just a service but a “re-education” in how people think about getting their taxes done. “The for-profit places make taxes seem like a mystery. Demystifying things for people is really important. When people realize they can do something, it is empowering.”

Neighboring builds financial skills and knowledge. Through the tax programs mentioned above, resident volunteers gain knowledge of taxes that affect their own lives. Subgrantees supported classes, workshops, and experiential learning sessions often led by resident volunteers and even resident staff members on topics such as budgeting, business planning, managing money, opening savings accounts, and filing taxes.

Neighboring helps promote workforce participation through job creation and skill development.

Neighboring indirectly affects workforce participation. Respondents alluded to life skills that they gained, or helped others gain, that are thought to have indirect impact on family economic security. As a staff member said, “The one thing that we want people to realize: a lot of things are transferable. Skills are transferable; attitudes are transferable; behaviors [are transferable].” Beneficiary knowledge, changed through more traditional areas of education, is also imparted by resident volunteers. One site serves a majority of resident clients at an “education level that is more about survival” and focuses on building basic reading, language, and math skills. There are also instances when resident volunteers are offered employment as a result of their volunteering, especially volunteer tax preparers.

Thanks to HandsOn Network