Strategic and Current Initiatives

Nexus recognizes that to achieve equitable and sustainable revitalization we must effectively link building the social, human and cultural capital of a community with the development of its physical and economic capital. As a result, our current activities focus on two key community-building strategies: asset building and community engagement.

Asset Building Initiatives

Asset Building initiatives help residents build greater individual and collective wealth.  To that end, Nexus helps to build better trained, confident, and successful asset builders through funding initiatives that provide culturally appropriate financial literacy, entrepreneurship, homeownership, and workforce development training, counseling, and technical support.  This set of asset building tools and supports helps communities anchor economically, and enhances sustainability in communities for many years to come.  Current initiatives include:

  • Supporting successful strategies of homeownership, from pre to post-purchase, including the East Side Homeownership Initiative

  • Successful entrepreneurship, including support for ethnic/cultural CDCs

  • Workforce development, including career advancement & job search

  • Bundled financial services, including the Centers for Working Families

  • Comprehensive community development pilots, in partnership with LISC

Community Engagement Initiatives

Community Engagement (CE) is a key strategy in our broader work of Community Building.  Community Engagement includes multiple concepts and techniques used to promote excluded residents’ participation in community life, and to strengthen neighborhood revitalization efforts.  Community members are engaged in efforts to recognize and build their own personal assets and potential, and to connect with others to create a stronger community engagement infrastructure within and across neighborhoods. Current initiatives include:

  • Convening and supporting neighborhood-wide visioning processes

  • Convening and supporting community organizers and organizations using CE as a key strategy of their work

  • Providing and supporting the use of technology as a CE strategy

  • Building the emerging CE field, both locally and nationally

Nexus believes that by bridging these two areas we can help create an actively engaged community that has greater power over and responsibility for the decisions that shape their community and is in a better position to take advantage of asset building opportunities to end long term poverty. 

Print this page.

 

About Us Menu