For 15 years, ACT built neighborhood collaboratives that responded to the diverse needs of children and families in ACT’s five targeted neighborhoods: Bedford Stuyvesant, Bushwick, Washington Heights-Inwood, Mott Haven and South Jamaica. These neighborhood collaboratives brought together individuals and organizations in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors, bridging the worlds of social service and economic development. Each collaborative assessed its community’s strengths and needs, set its action agenda and created a committee structure to carry out the collaborative’s priorities and projects. At the center of the collaborative was an ACT planner, whose role is to encourage and facilitate inclusive membership and participation, help the collaboratives formulate their objectives, and carry out a range of specific tasks to achieve goals. The collaborative created community-specific strategies to revitalize the neighborhood and improve the quality of services to connect families and children to the right services at the right time. Through the collaborative, ACT helped the neighborhood plan for itself.

“ACT Central” directly supported the neighborhood collaboratives and their local planners by providing information, advice, technical assistance, connections and resources. In this role, ACT Central became a service organization as soon as a local collaborative created its own priorities and strategic plan. The central staff also worked independently to decentralize and increase the responsiveness of services to the neighborhoods and advocate for policies that will improve the conditions for families and children throughout the city. In this role, ACT central staff were often “behind the scenes” educating, informing, interpreting, advising, offering ideas, and bringing people together—all in the pursuit of a vision of a comprehensive, coordinated, community-based service system for families and children that has “no wrong door.” The collaborative eventually dissolved, as communities became capable of organizing and mobilizing itself independently.

ACT’s Role Today

Gradually, ACT Central is redefining its presence, moving from “doing the invisible” and towards identifying a new and apparent role within New York City communities. As in the past, ACT is continuing its pioneering work with geographic community-specific data that was first used to galvanize local interest and inspire city government agencies to use local information to inform their planning and decisions.