collaboratives
Overview
The West Dallas Community Collaborative for Schools, Jobs and Housing(the "Collaborative") is a partnership of 17 West Dallas not-for-profit organizations and 13 schools, with extensive community input. The ongoing planning process is focused on three key areas: affordable housing, education and economic development. Each focus area is addressed in the Collaborative, a roadmap for not-for-profit community groups and neighborhood residents helping them to coalesce around a comprehensive vision for the families in the West Dallas neighborhood.
Collaborative for Schools | “The single greatest tool for exiting poverty is education.”
The Collaborative for Schools builds on the success of the Collaborative Housing effort. In late 2008 and early 2009, DFCC helped organize the West Dallas Education Task Force. For eighteen months, DFCC and its partners and advisors worked quietly behind the scenes with a group of educators and partners that included Southern Methodist University, public, charter and faith-based schools in West Dallas, parents and parent groups, the social sector, faith communities, and a variety of community residents, leaders and collaborators to explore the specific challenges faced by the students and parents and determine how DFCC and its partners could most effectively leverage their resources to improve educational opportunities for all of the families in West Dallas. Together they created the Collaborative for Schools (one of the three components of the Collaborative), a plan for transforming education and students’ lives.
The “ABCs of Education in West Dallas”
- Advocate | Advocate for education with parents and Dallas’ faith community,
- Build | Build community institutions such The School Zone – West Dallas,
- Choose | Support parent Choice (great public, parochial and charter schools),
- Demonstrate | Demonstrate partnership with institutions of higher learning, and
- Engage | Engage students in their own success.
Collaborative for Housing
The Collaborative for Housing, the first component to be approached at depth in the Collaborative, was launched in 2008 as the West Dallas Comprehensive Plan. DFCC had a bit of a head start on this component, as it had been hard at work helping to leverage affordable housing in West Dallas since 2006. During its first three years, DFCC helped to support Habitat for Humanity in the construction of more than 100 new affordable homes, as well as leading the effort to buy out a major slumlord.
In 2008, members of what was to become the Collaborative for Housing – Dallas Area Habitat for Humanity and Builders of Hope – committed to building or preserving an additional 198 affordable homes in West Dallas, with significant funding support from The Rees-Jones Foundation.
Collaborative for Jobs
Future goal: To be developed in 2013.
Offer a variety of means of generating income ranging from entrepreneurship and artistic endeavors, to traditional employment opportunities that provide a living wage for teens and adults. Develop a workforce that is able to capitalize upon these opportunities.
