USBC believes that communities thrive when residents take ownership of problems and opportunities and come together to generate solutions. These are our current initiatives to support community building:
Our Humanity: Advancing Health Literacy
Our Humanity: Advancing Health Literacy, involves a network of grassroots community organizations led by South Valley MainStreet, United South Broadway and Casa del Rey Ministeries. The partners will promote COVID 19 vaccinations and testing through mobile services, door-to-door canvassing, text messaging campaigns, and social media campaigns. The program will also connect community members with support resources such as wellness visits and preventative health care.
Communities involved in Our Humanity are South Broadway, San Jose, Santa Barbara-Martineztown, Trumbull/La Mesa/International District, Westgate, South Valley and Kirtland-Mountain View.
Community partners are Agri-Cultura Network, Ancestral Lands Project, International District Healthy Communities Coalition and the New Mexico Asian Family Center
Read / download Our Humanity newsletters here.
The Historic Neighborhood Alliance (HNA)
USBC is a founding member and leader of the 25-year-old Historic Neighborhood Alliance (HNA) that developed and promoted resident-driven Sector Development Plans to give Albuquerque neighborhoods a voice in land use. The Sector Plans protect quality of life and home values in low-income neighborhoods of color, and give low-income families a voice in public policy affecting their neighborhoods.
To ensure those voices are heard, the Alliance holds periodic community meetings to teach neighborhood residents civic-engagement skills that will have lasting value as a neighborhood resource:
How planning, zoning, traffic engineering and transit policies affect neighborhood quality of life and real estate values
How to prepare to testify before city council and county commission meetings
How to prepare to meet one-on-one with councilors, commissioners and state legislators
How to prepare to run for these offices themselves
Engaged residents are a living resource that maintains the community’s integrity through time and change.
The Anti-Racism Training Institute of the Southwest
The Anti-Racism Training Institute of the Southwest (ARTI) grew out of the work of Albuquerque Project Change, a multi-racial, multi- cultural organization founded in 1991 to address institutional racism in Albuquerque and three other cities across the nation (Seattle, New Orleans and Fort Lauderdale).
The work continued in collaboration with the Claremont Graduate College Institute for Democratic Renewal in Claremont, California under the leadership of the late John Maguire, and the University of New Mexico Public Policy Center.
Over the first decade of work it became clear that a major barrier to undoing racism is the lack of a shared analysis about what racism is. Even well-meaning people can’t agree about the basic definition of racism and therefore cannot forge alliances to uproot it.
In response USBC established ARTI as a permanent, community-based organization to take up the challenge through education and training.