Project Overview

Press Release, October, 2008 

The Community Action Organization of Erie County (CAO) and the University at Buffalo Center for Urban Studies (UB-CENTER) have partnered to launch the CAO-UB Community Wellness and Neighborhood Development Center, which will focus on the regeneration of the Fruit Belt and Martin Luther King, Jr. neighborhoods.  The partnership enables the CAO to blend its service capacity with the UB Center for Urban Studies’ research, neighborhood planning, community development, and technical support capacities.

The goals of this partnership are to turn these two neighborhoods into healthy, vibrant, and economically viable communities and to develop a model of neighborhood development, which is replicable across the city, state, and nation.

The wellness and neighborhood development center will employ a place-base regeneration strategy that focuses on both people and the neighborhoods in which they live.  The idea is to fortify the social and cultural foundation of these two communities, while simultaneously rebuilding their physical environments and developing their neighborhood economies.

This partnership creates a unique opportunity for the CAO and the UB-CENTER to strengthen their commitment to the redevelopment of these two communities by establishing a sustainable institution that will provide the neighborhoods with technical support, partnership building, planning,  research, community development, and social welfare services, including job readiness and job placement programs. 

The CAO-UB Wellness and Neighborhood Development center will use an inside/outside approach to development.  Inside the neighborhoods, the center will collaborate with existing organizations, institutions, and block clubs to meet their goals and objectives, while simultaneously promoting collaboration among groups unused to working with one another. 

Most important, the CAO-UB center will create innovative strategies for increasing community involvement, developing neighborhood social capital, and finding financial support for developmental activities.  

At the same time, the center will encourage organizations outside the Fruit Belt and Martin Luther King, Jr. to join in the quest to develop these two communities.  The plan is to advance the idea that inner city redevelopment is a strategic regional problem, which all groups should participate in solving.

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