Alhambra - The Gateway City

AmeriCorps - our new partner
by Dawn Miller

I attended the AmeriCorps orientation on Monday May 5th through Friday May 9th in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA as a part of Kingdom Causes Alhambra's new partnership with AmeriCorps. Other branches of Kingdom Causes in Long Beach and elsewhere have been partnered with AmeriCorps in their community development efforts for a few years now. With this new partnership, Alhambra can utilize our support from the CRWRC (Christian Reformed World Relief Committee) and AmeriCorps to target specific neighborhoods for community development.

Our target neighborhood will include the downtown core, including the Police Dept, City Hall, the Alhambra municipal courts, Alhambra high school and the new city library, which is still under construction. It will also include a portion of the neighborhood south of the downtown core and focus on getting these residents connected with the city agencies and services whose purpose is to serve them.

The Americorps training was an overview and introduction to the program for participants (such as myself!) for the first two days and then 1st year participants went through Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) training. This kind of community development focuses on the assets already existent in a community and uses community mobilizers to connect people and catalyze the use of those assets. Another way to describe this is strengths-based community development. Similar to the StrengthsFinder test, which focuses on leaders' strengths and how to capitalize on them, ABCD focuses on the assets the community already has and looks to community organizers to help connect people with those assets and get people collaborating to make a better community.

From Garfield Ave.(East) to 4th St. (West) and Woodward Ave.(North) to Misson Rd. (South) - this is our target neighborhood.

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