Association for Better Community Development Inc. (ABCD)
Association for Urban Training Opportunities (A.U.T.O.)
Will Dent, President and CEO
1225 Gross Ave. NE
Canton, Ohio 44705
(216) 455-6385
(216) 455-3913

I wanted to visit this group because of its effort to replicate the Esperanza Unida auto-repair model for job training, but when I got there, I learned that the A.U.T.O. training program is just one feature of a broad, comprehensive program that's been responding with aggressive creativity to the needs of Canton's poor people for more than 20 years.

It began in 1972, when the United Methodist Church challenged black congregations across the country to organize their communities, and Canton's tiny Turner Chapel United Methodist Church set up it Black Community Developers Program (BCD), which Dent soon retitled ADVOCATES for Black Community Development, ABCD. It wasn't too many years before its efforts had spread throughout Stark County and reached poor people of all races, yielding the more inclusive new title, "Association for Better Community Development." ("People always look us up under ABCD anyway," Dent said with a smile.)

Over the years, ABCD frequently shifted gears and took on new challenges as they arose within the community. Initially, it focused on institutional community organizing, setting up effective organizations to push for tenant rights, welfare rights, the rights of domestic workers, and other interest groups in the city's Southeast side, which had been battered by the old "urban removal" style of urban renewal, in which highway construction and "slum clearance" had eliminated a thriving black community of homes and businesses, leaving behind a small core of public housing and subsidized apartments.

The group sought unsuccessfully to raise money for a black cultural and recreational center, but had better luck in setting up a food cooperative and purchasing and operating a convenience grocery store and gasoline station. It created jobs by setting up a network of chore services for senior citizens, including grass cutting and snow removal. (The coop later closed when the federal CETA program ended, and the grocery store lost money and closed; but the lawn-care effort survived and has since spun off as a private business providing many jobs.)

At that point, the organization responded to another need, setting up a single van to take elderly people to the doctor and on other errands; it wasn't long before this casual effort expanded into a large, government and private funded Dial-A-Ride and transportation system serving the entire county including Alliance, a rural area. ABCD's Transportation Program is one of its major efforts today, operating 15 vans, two mini-buses and a bus.

But that's not all. ABCD's housing program, through its affiliated Development Alliance Inc. (formerly Alliance Area Farmworkers Housing Development Corp.) leveraged the construction of a $1.2 million, 24-unit apartment complex for seasonal farm workers around Alliance, a major agricultural area. Also in the field of housing, ABCD's in-house weatherization company is insulating an average of 300 homes per year along with providing jobs. The Home ownership programs are improving housing stock and enabling low to moderate people to become homeowners.

In partnership with other agencies in the Stark County Out of Poverty Program, ABCD's Family Development Project is providing intensive, holistic case management for a select group of families, sticking with them for three to five years with the goal, Dent says, of "getting them off welfare and making sure that they never go back on it again."

The new Center for Enterprise Development, another partnership effort, will set up a small-business incubator providing technical assistance and support for small, minority-owned businesses as well as establishing a micro-loan program.

And last but far from least, A.U.T.O. graduated its first class of nine new auto mechanics on July 21. This effort, loosely modeled on Esperanza Unida but altered to fit the local situation, is housed in a working salvage yard (van and truck junkyard) that ABCD purchased as a going business and has restored from a decayed condition into a shiny, bright building that's the pride of its neighborhood. Rather than working on customers' cars as in Esperanza Unida, students learn mechanics from a trained instructor in the classroom, then get hands-on experience by disassembling junked trucks in the salvage yard and restoring usable parts as stock for sale. The 12-week course isn't designed to turn them out as high-skill mechanics, but to qualify them quickly for jobs in the $7/hour range -- which are widely available in the Canton area -- with the commitment that they will continue to take evening auto-mechanics courses at Stark Technical College while working days, an effort that will lead after two more years to qualification as ASIE-rated mechanics capable of earning $17 an hour and up.

AUTO intends to run three mechanic courses a year; the salvage yard at this point is returning between $6,000 and $9,000 a month in revenue, enough to cover about half the cost of the program.

Overall, ABCD operates on a $1.2 million annual budget, including $500,000 for transportation and $600,000 for housing and economic development, with a staff of 38. AUTO's separate budget is about $264,000, and it has a staff of three plus a contract instructor.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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