Coalition For A Better Acre (CBA)
Neal Newman, Executive Director
Lee Winkelman, Organizing Director, (508) 970-2103; E-Mail: leew@igc.apc.org
Sothea Chirmruom, Community Organizer
450 Merrimack St.
Lowell, Mass. 01854
(508) 452-7523
(508) 452-4923 fax

This outstanding organization's track record shows in the real world, in the form of the dozens of well-kept and freshly painted houses that dot its neighborhood, the brawling "Acre" section of South Lowell that's been a point of arrival for immigrant communities since Irish and Greek immigrants settled there more than a century ago. More recently it's been Latino; and now it's becoming one of the largest Cambodian settlements in the United States.

Along with poverty, the Acre has suffered most of the problems that poverty deals people, from joblessness and crime to disinvestment and absentee landlords. But CBA has made a real difference during its 13-year history by making a happy marriage between two powerful elements that aren't always seen in harness: Community economic development and community organizing.

CBA emerged from an urban renewal plan in 1982 that would have leveled much of the Acre and dispersed its residents. The community mobilized, beat the plan, then recognized that the opportunity for long-term improvement lay in coming up with their OWN plan for the neighborhood and doing whatever they could to make it happen.

Much of the group's focus has been on housing -- it has facilitated more than 400 low- and medium-price housing units in the neighborhood, including the 270-unit North Canal Apartments complex, a low-income project built by the private sector and then left to decay. CBA got control, renovated the buildings, and they now offer residents quality, moderate-price housing.

Even CBA's own offices, in a sturdy three-story business block, include two floors of rental apartments and a row of commercial storefronts that house the group's offices plus commercial tenants whose rent helps pay the bills. (With a staff of 12 full-time employees, CBA gets by on a $800,000 annual budget.)

CBA has also been involved in jobs and economic development. It started, then spun off, the Acre Family Day Care Corp., which trains local women for careers in family day care and human services; the Enterprise Development Center, a small-business incubator housing such thriving new ventures as a company that makes ergonomically designed computer "mice;"and a microenterprise peer-lending program.

A recent venture combines several bootstraps efforts in one: Acre Food for Acre Residents (AFAR) uses community gardening as a tool to unify the community's large and growing Cambodian population, providing them both a source of nutritious food and an opportunity to get involved in political organizing -- not a casual thing for people who recently fled a country where political outspokenness can result in jail or worse. The group has already identified four vacant lots as potential garden sites, cleaned them up, begun negotiating with the city to take control of them, and worked with a local design firm to come up with plans -- based on the residents' own ideas -- to turn them into not merely gardens but parks. If all goes well, they'll have at least two in operation next spring.

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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