Stories of Philanthropic Leadership in Advancing Regional and ...

housing developments and commercial projects. CityHeights Center, a six-story office building onUniversity Avenue, houses primarily nonprofit andpublic agencies providing services to the CityHeights community.The City Heights Center is envisioned as a one-stop service center for CityHeights residents. Accordingly, the Center is seeking to attract publicagencies and nonprofit organizations that will provide services to the CityHeights community. (Source: Price Charities).Price has supported several other development effortsin the neighborhood as well. The Model SchoolProject is collaboration between Price Charities,SDSU, the San Diego Unified School District, the SanDiego Housing Commission, and the city of SanDiego to build a “smarter” urban school throughcreative land use and by integrating housing into thedesign. Another example is the Metro Career Center, anew 86,000-square foot office building housing aregional job-training center operated by WorkforcePartnership. The office building houses the San DiegoWorkforce Partnership, bringing essential job trainingand job placement services to City Heights. TheMetro Career Center has almost 500 off-street parkingspaces, two “tot lot” playgrounds, and anticipates theThe Metro Center was completed in November 2004. The project consistsof 120 rental units (Metro Villas) developed by the City Heights CommunityDevelopment Corporation and an 82,000-square foot office building(Metro Career Center) developed by San Diego Revitalization Corporation.The office building houses the San Diego Workforce Partnership, whichbrings essential job training and job placement services to City Heights.(Source: Price Charities).addition of a day care center in 2005. Price Charitieshas also assisted the City Heights CommunityDevelopment Corporation with the acquisition ofland and entitlements to build 120 affordable housingunits on the remainder of the block.Additionally, the Community Service Programencourages the engagement of City Heights residentsby providing service opportunities in localnonprofits. Participants can reduce a portion of theirmortgage or rent payments by providing communityservice. The Home Loan Program, developed withthe San Diego Revitalization Corporation, provides$50,000 down-payment assistance to first-timehomebuyers who reside in City Heights and purchasewithin specified boundaries. Borrowers can pay offthe accumulated interest of the loan by performingcommunity service.Furthermore, the Price Community BuilderFellowship Program builds local capacity by annuallysponsoring six recent graduates from the SDSUSchool of Social Work to work as staff in sixnonprofit agencies in City Heights for 11 months.Both the students and the nonprofits arecompetitively selected based on an applicationprocess. Even more, Price funds the differencebetween what the nonprofit can afford and the costof the position. While in the program, theCommunity Builder also attends bimonthly trainingseminars and works collectively to address anidentified community issue facing City Heights. Inexchange for their service, the Community Buildersreceive scholarships to the Master’s in Social WorkProgram at SDSU from Price Charities.The community-building field is grappling across theboard with key questions on how to best strengthenand sustain comprehensive community initiatives.The Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovationdetermined that making resident ownership a realityrequires not only forging a new role for residents, butalso a fundamental reevaluation of the role ofphilanthropy in supporting such efforts. It alsodetermined that several values were core to achievingthe transformation it envisioned. The first of suchvalues is “community listening,” defined in the wordsof one JCNI staff member as “asking residents whatthey want before you know what you want.” Itmeans eliciting information about residentaspirations and works in the community, in order tobuild on those strengths. Underlying Market CreekLIVABLE NEIGHBORHOODS/STRONG REGIONSPart III: Section 2: Making All Neighborhoods Stable, Healthy, and Livable as Building Blocks for a Strong Region 86