Neighborhood Initiatives

One of the best ways to attract attention and form group unity is to focus on an important issue in your neighborhood. Neighbors do not attend meetings or become interested in your association unless you are doing worthwhile projects for their benefit or the benefit of their area. It’s important that you determine the needs of your neighborhood and focus on those needs until you demonstrate success.

Determine the needs of your neighborhood through meetings and personal discussions with neighbors during a walk-through. After you construct a list of possible needs, discuss them in reasonable depth to identify the issues. When you have identified the issues, discuss each one and agree on the priority of each issue. Sort the issues into short-term or long-term projects and begin to evaluate how your association would like to approach each issue.

In developing your neighborhood projects, focus on a specific issue that will demonstrate action and results and that will be visible in the neighborhood. Get the whole community behind the project by promoting the issue as much as possible. This will provide lots of participation for you to establish a large membership base. If you are successful in achieving your goals or effecting change on a single issue, it demonstrates that your association is an effective group. This establishes the credibility and worthiness of your association, characteristics which are important to long-term survival.

In planning projects, keep the ball rolling with a list of projects and activities that will maintain participation and interest. This requires a lot of anticipation and organization by association members. The best approach is to plan around a calendar. Do not suffocate your members with more projects than time will allow. Choose a pace and stay consistent. Slow progress is often better than no progress at all. Keep people involved in all levels and give people specific jobs (with specific time frames) to do. Everyone is willing to contribute a little bit of time. Do not give too much responsibility to one person when it can be easily delegated to several.

Neighbors in action

The following is a list of possible short- and long-term projects:

• Neighborhood clean-up
• Community garden, tree planting, flower planting
• Back-to-school party and school supply drive
• Murals or neighborhood art project
• Neighborhood scrapbook or video
• Neighborhood watch program
• Neighborhood identification signs
• Security lighting
• Tool lending libraries
• Tutoring program for youth
• Home tours
• Neighborhood cook-out, picnic, or potluck
• National night out celebration
• Holiday celebration
• Neighborhood t-shirts
• Yard of the month award
• Neighborhood newsletter, web site, directory, or telephone/email tree
• Paint up/fix up projects
• Speakers on topics of interest to the neighborhood
• Representative to attend city council, school board, and planning commission meetings
• Philanthropic projects, such as "adopting" a family who needs help with Christmas dinner

Keeping interest in the association

Once you have tackled a few projects, how do you keep people interested? This by far is the biggest challenge for any neighborhood association. In general, members will participate if following are present:

• Business and social events in which to participate.
• Issues of importance to discuss
• Clean and visible accomplishments
• Organized, competent leaders
• Events to recognize participants