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Mytown, an acronym for Multicultural Youth Tour of What's Now, was a youth organization based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, engaging young people in learning about and teaching others about the local history of their urban neighborhood.
Mytown was founded in 1995 by Karilyn Crockett and Denise Thomas, [1] with a mission to "use the process of sharing local history to empower young people and build appreciation of urban neighborhoods. Mytown believes that young people and communities can realize the power local history has in increasing youth activism and decreasing the stereotypes that stigmatize urban neighborhoods."
Since the organization's founding, mytown has trained nearly 300 low and moderate-income Boston teenagers in learning the history of their neighborhood, community and city. Once trained, members lead historical walking tours of Boston's neighborhoods to almost 10,000 Boston residents and visitors annually.
Founder Karilyn Crockett, as a young African American girl, felt disconnected from Boston, the city in which she was raised. She went on a walking tour of Roxbury and the South End, learning about the history of the Pullman Porters, Tent City Settlement, and about the many migrants and immigrants from around the world that had built and transformed Boston over 350 years. [2] Crockett's tour was transformative; for the first time she felt that Boston was a place that she could call "my town."
The Municipal Art Society of New York (MAS) is a non-profit membership organization for preservation in New York City, which aims to encourage thoughtful planning and urban design and inclusive neighborhoods across the city.
Roxbury is a neighborhood within the City of Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
The South End is a neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts, United States which is bordered by Back Bay, Chinatown, and Roxbury. It is distinguished from other neighborhoods by its Victorian-style houses and the parks in and around the area. The South End is the largest intact Victorian row-house district in the country, covering over 300 acres (120 ha). It has eleven residential parks. In 1973, the South End was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Much of the neighborhood was originally marshlands in Boston's South Bay. After it was filled in, construction began in 1849.
Chinatown, Boston is a neighborhood located in downtown Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is the only surviving historic ethnic Chinese enclave in New England since the demise of the Chinatowns in Providence, Rhode Island and Portland, Maine after the 1950s. Because of the high population of Asians and Asian Americans living in this area of Boston, there is an abundance of Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants located in Chinatown. It is one of the most densely populated residential areas in Boston and serves as the largest center of its East Asian and Southeast Asian cultural life.
Precita Eyes Muralists Association is a community-based non-profit muralist and arts education group located in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1977 by Susan and Luis Cervantes.
Mission Hill is a 3⁄4 square mile, primarily residential neighborhood of Boston, bordered by Roxbury, Jamaica Plain and Fenway-Kenmore and the town of Brookline. The neighborhood has two main streets, namely Tremont Street and Huntington Avenue. It is served by several stations on the MBTA's Green Line E branch, as well as Roxbury Crossing station on the Orange Line.
Chicago Area Project (CAP) is an American juvenile delinquency prevention association based in Chicago, Illinois. The association has been acting since early 20th century. The project was founded by University of Chicago criminologist Clifford Shaw. As of 2009, its current executive director is David E. Whittaker.
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights is a non-profit strategy and action center based in Oakland, California. The stated aim of the center is to work for justice, opportunity and peace in urban America. It is named for Ella Baker, a twentieth-century activist and civil rights leader originally from Virginia and North Carolina.
ZUMIX is a non-profit cultural organization located in East Boston, Massachusetts. The organization is dedicated to using the arts, particularly music, to build community, foster cultural understanding, and encourage self-expression among urban youth in the neighborhood. ZUMIX works primarily with low-income or at-risk youth, ranging from ages eight to eighteen. The non-profit serves more than 500 youth annually through after-school and summer programming and an additional 500 through in-school partnerships. More than 10,000 additional adults, children, and families attend ZUMIX's community events and festivals.
Karl Linn was an American landscape architect, psychologist, educator, and community activist, best known for inspiring and guiding the creation of "neighborhood commons" on vacant lots in East Coast inner cities during the 1960s through 1980s. Employing a strategy he called "urban barnraising," he engaged neighborhood residents, volunteer professionals, students, youth teams, social activists, and community gardeners in envisioning, designing, and constructing instant, temporary, and permanent gathering spaces in neighborhoods, on college campuses, and at sites of major conferences and events. "Linn is considered 'Father of American Participatory Architecture' by many academic colleagues and architectural and environmental experts of the National Endowment for the Arts."
Southwest Corridor Park is a linear urban park in Boston, Massachusetts, part of the Metropolitan Park System of Greater Boston and managed by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR). It extends from the South End and Back Bay neighborhoods south for almost five miles (8 km), ending in the Forest Hills section of Jamaica Plain in what was originally planned to be the alignment for Interstate 95 to Boston. It closely follows the routes of regional Amtrak and Commuter Rail lines and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Orange Line rapid transit rail line, from its Back Bay Station to its terminus at Forest Hills station. It features tennis courts, basketball courts, playgrounds, and walking, jogging, and biking paths.
Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) is an anti-poverty, community development and human services organization founded in 1961 as Boston Community Development Program (BCDP) in Boston, Massachusetts and incorporated as Action for Boston Community Development in 1962, serving as a prototype for urban “human renewal” agencies.
Community gardens in the United States benefit both gardeners and society at large. Community gardens provide fresh produce to gardeners and their friends and neighbors. They provide a place of connection to nature and to other people. In a wider sense, community gardens provide green space, a habitat for insects and animals, sites for gardening education, and beautification of the local area. Community gardens provide access to land to those who otherwise could not have a garden, such as apartment-dwellers, the elderly, and the homeless. Many gardens resemble European allotment gardens, with plots or boxes where individuals and families can grow vegetables and flowers, including a number which began as victory gardens during World War II. Other gardens are worked as community farms with no individual plots at all, similar to urban farms.
The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS) is a not-for profit museum founded by the Times Up! Environmental Organization in 2012. It is dedicated to archiving the history of community gardens, squatting, and grassroots environmental activism of the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. Located in the storefront of C-Squat at 155 Avenue C, the museum documents how neighborhood residents transformed abandoned spaces and lots in the neighborhood into squats and gardens. By preserving the neighborhood's history, the museum aims to educate communities and individuals to keep this form of sustainable, community-based activism alive.
Lily Yeh is an artist whose work has taken her to communities throughout the world. She grew up in Taiwan and moved to the United States in 1963 to attend the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts. She was a professor of painting and art history at University of the Arts (Philadelphia) from 1968 until 1998. As founder and executive director of The Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia from 1986 to 2004, she helped create a national model in creative place-making and community building through the arts. In 2002, Yeh pursued her work internationally, founding Barefoot Artists, Inc. In addition to the United States, she has carried out projects in several other countries.
Founded in 1969, the Boston Society of Vulcans of Massachusetts is a community-based, non-profit organization of Black and Latino firefighters in Boston. Their mission is to encourage urban Bostonians to pursue public safety careers. They also promote public safety and fire prevention through education programs and various other resources. The Boston Society of Vulcans is a member of the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters, an association formed in 1969 in New York City to address the larger issue of racial discrimination faced by African-American firefighters nationwide. The Boston Society of Vulcans descended from the Vulcan Society of the FDNY, a black fraternal order of firefighters organized in 1940 to promote diversity and aid minority recruitment to the ranks of civil servants.
Sports-based youth development or SBYD is a theory and practice model for direct youth service. Grounded in youth development, sports psychology, and youth sports practice, SBYD aims to use the sport experience to contribute to positive youth development. Sports-based youth development is similar to sport for social development.
The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, or DSNI, is a nonprofit, community-run organization based in Roxbury, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1984 by residents of the Dudley Street Neighborhood, along with members of the Riley Foundation, as an effort to rebuild the poverty-stricken community surrounding then-Dudley Square. It is known as the first and only community-run grassroots organization to gain "the power of eminent domain" by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, meaning the community controls its own development and the use of the land. Today, 35 board of directors help to govern the more than 3,000 active members of DSNI. The board of directors are elected by locals every two years, and must represent the community's four major ethnic groups: African American, Cape Verdean, Latino and White, as well as the local youth, businesses, nonprofits, churches and CDC's that support the initiative.
Urban Growers Collective is a non-profit organization that builds urban farms, gardens, and provides fresh foods primarily in underprivileged areas in the West and South Side of Chicago. The organization was founded in Chicago, Illinois in 2017 by Erika Allen and Laurell Sims. As of 2019, there are eight urban farms that have been created and are run by Urban Growers Collective.
Tunney Lee was an architect, planner, educator, and activist known for his community engagement work primarily in Chinatown, Boston. Lee was a professor emeritus of urban planning and a former head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) within the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. He is also known as the founder of the Department of Architecture at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), now called the School of Architecture. Lee also maintained a career in public service as chief of planning and design for the Boston Redevelopment Authority and deputy commissioner of the state Division of Capital Planning and Operations under Governor Michael S. Dukakis. He died on July 2, 2020, in Boston at the age of 88.
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