Author: MakeCommunities
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Grassroots Gardens of Buffalo
Grassroots Gardens has long been Buffalo’s community garden support organization. Community Gardens are an incredible reuse of vacant or underutilized land in the city, and create neighborhood assets out of liabilities. In addition, they can provide fresh, healthy food in “food deserts” – communities where it can be difficult to access fresh produce. With more…
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Think Spring: Urban Roots
Posting will be light this week as Make Communities takes a very non-MTV-style spring break. In lieu of regular updates, we’ll be posting links to some of our favorite places and organizations that make us think of spring – even if the snow is still flying. First up: Urban Roots. Urban Roots Community Cooperative Garden…
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what are your five?
In addition to Monday’s reference to Simran Noor’s five actions the bike movement can take to advance racial equity, two other articles came across the screen this week with five points of advice for people-focused urban regeneration. The first, from Bloomberg Philanthropies Tommy Pacello who served as the Director of the Mayor’s Innovation Team in Memphis, TN.…
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Buffalo’s Best Google Pac-Man Maps
If you haven’t yet played the Google Maps Pac-Mac mash-up, then do yourself a favor and play it now before it’s gone. Just don’t expect to accomplish much else today… Here are some great places to try out in Buffalo, with thanks to both Ellicott and Olmsted, click the maps for the direct link: Niagara…
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The Bike Movement & Racial Equity via the Center for Social Inclusion
“We define racial equity as both an outcome and a process. A racially equitable society is one in which race no longer determines one’s life outcomes and in which we recognize that when we address inequity, we all share in the benefits of increased fairness and justice.” For today’s post, Make Communities is going to…
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Complete Streets Plus ____(?)_____
Forgive us if the mind wanders a bit on a chilly spring Friday morning… but this is one of those posts about Copenhagen. We spend a lot of time thinking about Complete Streets here at Make Communities. Not only is it part of the day job to work to help communities make their streets safe,…
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Today It’s All About You
If you’re in Buffalo, then hopefully you know about the great work that Clean Air Coalition and the Common Council’s Participatory Budget Committee have been doing to bring direct democratic control to the people of this city. For those of you who have been following this exciting progress, tonight’s open house is a great opportunity…
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Friday Finances: Buffalo’s City Inequality Rank
Buffalo ranks very low in income at the top and the bottom ends of household earnings, ranks high in inequality. Though it may not have been big news in the mainstream press, if you run in policy wonk circles, you’ve probably seen the recently released Inequality Rankings from Alan Berube and Natalie Holmes at Brookings.…
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Anchor Institutions and the New Economy in Buffalo
Last week, Make Communities was on hand as a host of national and local partners convened to discuss how anchor institutions and local communities can partner to improve outcomes for both sides. The timing for this conversation is certainly ripe given the large scale public investment in these anchors here in Buffalo. Read more about…
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Lessons from LA’s New Economy
A definite highlight of the Open Places convening in Puerto Rico last week was an incredibly dynamic and engaging session with Cecilia Estolano of Estolano LeSar Perez Advisors and Roxana Tynan of LAANE. Together they describe the unlikely partnership between community and bureaucracy [actually not a dirty word…] that they forged during Ms. Estolano’s tenure…