Neighbor For Neighbor (NFN)
Diane S. Perkins, Executive Director
1506 E. 46th St. North
Tulsa, Okla. 74126
(918) 425-5578
(918) 425-5112 direct line
(918) 425-6935 fax

More than 30 years ago, Father Dan Allen, a Catholic priest with a strong sense of justice, caused quite an uproar when he became a strong advocate for civil rights and racial integration, at a time when the community around his Northside Tulsa parish was undergoing racial change and most of his white parishoners weren't happy about that.

He eventually broke with the diocese and later with the Church, but Neighbor for Neighbor -- the grassroots initiative that grew out of his commitment -- remains in place, serving almost 38,000 poor and hungry Tulsans annually with a broad, holistic range of emergency and supportive services.

"The active word in our name is 'for,'" says Diane Perkins, who took the reins of NFN two years ago after Allen died, and who carries it on very much in his tradition.

NFN started in a little farmhouse next door to St. Jude's Catholic Church, where Allen was pastor, but the old house is now only the core of a remarkable complex of donated, scrounged and borrowed structures that have spread out into a virtual campus of helping activities -- one wing is a former gasoline station; another used to be an administrative shack for the state highway department. Sprawling back from the road and surrounding a gravel parking area that turns into a bazaar on sunny days when the used-clothing facility moves outdoors, the complex houses a food "store," too large and organized to be described as a "pantry"; another facility for donated clothing; a legal-services office; and free but fully professional medical and dental clinics and an optical shop and free pharmacy run entirely by volunteer staff.

After building this base of emergency and support services for a generation, five years ago Allen received a call from an anonymous benefactor, who asked, in essence, "If you could do anything you wanted here, and money wasn't an object, what would you do?" His answer didn't require long thought: Economic development services, creating EMPOWERMENT. The benefactor responded with a $600,000 gift intended to make that happen.

NFN used the grant to create a program called "Neighborhood Centers" or "Safe Houses," in which it selected a house in each of six low-income neighborhoods (purchasing the first two, then working with neighborhood leaders to identify a similar existing location in four more), and seeking to "build out" from these centers to recover neighborhoods wracked by poverty, gangs and drugs. The goal is to spread through a 12-block neighborhood around each "Neighborhood Center" core, enlisting the good will of neighbors and their youngsters to improve housing, economics and education block-by-block, then moving on to another neighborhood in the hopeful case that they successfully win back the blocks where they started.

They accomplish this through a wide variety of approaches, ranging from counseling services to after-school tutoring and arts programs and active sports teams (which are already serving 100 youngsters weekly and will expand to 150 in January 1998) to tree-planting and community gardens (including a plan to build a garden and greenhouse as a teaching and economic-development tool).

They also organize both renters and home-owners, working with the former to encourage absentee slumlords to improve their properties, and with the latter to help with home repairs and needed rehabilitation and maintenance. They've even established a micro-loan program ("Neighbors for Economic Development") and are moving into small-business development and entrepreneurial training.

"We're at a fork in the road in Tulsa," Perkins said. "But we can keep our inner city from going the way so many others have, if we work hard enough."

"Inner city" may seem like an odd term to describe this almost rural looking neighborhood with its single-family houses, large lawns and shade trees, but poverty responds to creative attacks whether it comes in frame homes or tenement buildings.

Like most model grassroots programs, NFN gets a great deal accomplished on a metaphorical shoestring; its staff of just 16 (bolstered by 500 volunteers) gets by on an annual budget of $450,000 for all its emergency services, plus $200,000 a year for three years from the empowerment grant.

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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