In March of this year, Community Coalition’s South Central by South Central community organizing campaign was selected as one of four winners of L.A.’s 2019 Great Streets Challenge! The resident leaders’ focus was on executing a project that will ultimately uplift the leadership of South LA community members to change their communities for the better. The primary goals of the project were to successfully engage a mass base of Vermont-Manchester community stakeholders and South LA residents to conceptualize and lead a process that results in changing the landscape of a historic South LA community to reflect those who live there. Just as important as addressing the material conditions of the site was the need to reflect the rich legacy of culture, advancement, and success for Black and Latinx residents in jeopardy of displacement.
This accomplishment comes with $500,000 to begin transforming the Vermont/Manchester into the People’s Plaza, plus an additional $12,000 to conduct further community outreach for the next four months to finalize the concept design! The Great Streets Challenge is a program of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Great Streets Initiative to envision, collaborate on, and build transformative street infrastructure projects. The Great Streets Challenge aims to:
- Build strong partnerships between communities and the City of Los Angeles.
- Empower communities to develop a vision to transform their neighborhood street corridors.
- Design streets with a community’s vision of how to improve our neighborhoods for all people.
- Implement projects that transform our streets into safe, accessible, and vibrant public spaces in alignment with adopted City policies.