Ellie Towne at 2007 AAC
We’ve redesigned the National Civic League website.
Link here to give it a spin.
We wanted to make it more user friendly and emphasize community success stories.
Most of our success stories will come from National Civic League programs, especially the All-America City Award, but we would like to hear from you if you know of other stories. Feel free to e-mail them to us at aac@ncl.org.
In the meantime, take a look at some of our featured success stories, for instance, the one on Flowing Wells, Arizona. Flowing Wells was one of the stars of the 2007 All-American City Awards, which was a pretty good year. It was a neighborhood or area, really, half inside of Tucson and half in unincorporated Pima County. Community organizer Ellie Towne led and effort to clean up the meth labs and bring in new a bunch of amenities, for instance, a new community center, a health clinic and a couple of parks.
“We had no services in the area,” recalled Ellie Towne when we interviewed her in 2007. “Our children had no place to play. Neither did anybody have a place to go to have fun their families. It was just a desert area. I was standing at my back fence and I was so disgusted with what was out there—people racing around in their vehicles, drug activity, kids building those dirt mounds to go over on their bikes. There were fires. Grass would grow and weeds and nobody to take care of it. Now it is so much nicer. There are football fields, a walking path, people jogging or riding their bikes.”
A great story about community organizing and public/nonprofit partnerships.
