Canyon Corridor

Canyon Corridor is an urban neighborhood in Phoenix Arizona. With a population of 20,000 people, we are extremely diverse, with over 27 languages spoken. Many refugees have made Canyon Corridor their home, giving all community members access to different cultures: Latino, Burundi, Burmese, Iraqi, Iranian, Vietnamese, Bosnian, Philippine, Chinese, Japanese and more. In addition to our diversity, our community is resource rich and includes several parks, a local university, strong faith based communities, several apartment complexes with large clubhouses for community activities /gatherings and a weed and seed project. Many of the challenges we face, such as lack of retail and high rates of abandoned and foreclosed homes, result from a lack of community and economic development.

Our broad vision for the neighborhood is to reweave the fabric of the Canyon Corridor community to become more socially and economically vibrant. Our contribution to that vision so far has been to engage residents of all ages in neighborhood academies and workshops that build leadership skills, work with local residents and organizations and police to create a block party that helped build leadership, community connection and raise awareness of our work, create social networking profiles for our community work, partner with GCU to provide ESL classes for all ages, conduct an asset mapping of the community and begin the developing our first “community life center”. The community life centers centers are designed to utilize exisiting physical spaces to create intergenerational activities, meetings and classes.