Flagstaff Arizona

The historic neighborhood of Southside is the oldest continuously occupied neighborhood in the city of Flagstaff. Over the years, the diversity of our population has continued growing and now includes African-American, Hispanic/Latino, White and Native American residents. Our residents hold a strong sense of home and community, and are proud of our cultural diversity. There is a state run university within the town, which is both an asset and a challenge. The university brings valuable resources, jobs and business to the community, but (like many low-income neighborhoods that are homes to universities), we have faced a range of challenges over the years in creating relationships that meet the needs of long term residents, university students, staff and faculty alike. In creating the Communities for all Ages Team, which includes both local residents and members of the university, we hope to begin a process of creating real and meaningful dialogue and action across our differences and hopefully generating useful lessons for other community coalitions bringing together both university members and long term residents.

We are in the early phases of the Initiative: building our coalition, assessing community strengths and challenges and planning. We took a longer time than anticipated to work on the team building aspect of our work—but this process has provided our members with a number of valuable lessons on what is really involved in working across differences and using conflicts to create opportunities for growth. The assessment and community visioning process we have been involved with since has benefitted from the foundation created by this earlier team-building work.