Community Outreach

NHDC continues to create community relationships through several projects throughout the year. Our team recognizes the fundamental value of serving our community through partnerships and activism and is committed reaching out to make a difference for our neighboring residents of Gainesville, Florida.

Learn More About NHDC's Community Strategies:

• Community Leadership
• Youth build
• NeighborWorks Week
• University of Florida Student Community Projects
• Emergency Home Repair
• City of Gainesville Senior Home Repair

The Community Leadership Institute

The Community Leadership Institute (CLI), a regional training conference hosted and sponsored through NeighborWorks America’s Southern District, is exclusively designed for community based participants, and aimed to strengthen the voices and skills of neighborhood residents in civic and organizational affairs. This year, NHDC placed special emphasis on identifying and recruiting community resident leaders and providing an opportunity to enhance their leadership skills. Betty Reaves, Resident Team Coordinator, will be recruiting participants to attend the leadership conference in Baltimore, MD. Each participant will be enrolled in classes that will enhance leadership skills and bring about helpful strategies that will assist in residential concerns and improvements. A theme of “financial literacy for the youth” is what we hope will resonate throughout the team's volunteership of targeted churches and youth programs within the existing neighborhood/areas of Gainesville. If you are interested in joining this year’s CLI group, please contact Kate Phillips@ 352-380-9119

Impact Statement: Betty Reaves

One of the workshops I attended was taking the Mystery out of Budgets & Financial Statements. In this workshop, we met five learning objectives listed below:
Identify and define the various components of balance sheets and income statements.
Complete an exercise that demonstrates how various transactions impact balance sheet and financial statements.
Discuss two financial ratios and how they are used to analyze the financial health of non-profit organization.
Articulate the importance of budgeting and the importance considerations of preparing a budget.
Complete an exercise that demonstrates the principles of budgeting.

In the General Session, there was a passion for people to love the people and neighborhoods in which they live. It was a contagious feeling to want to come back to my neighborhood and make a difference. I am totally sold by the experience of the Conference. I am going to take steps to make a difference in my neighborhood.

Attending the CLI in Atlanta was a rewarding experience for me. It focused my awareness toward neighborhood and community issues on a much wider scale than I had perceived before I arrived.

What I learned, while at the conference is that neighborhoods are constantly changing and becoming more diverse at a rapid rate. Residents of my neighborhood need to communicate with one another and make it a personal obligation to make a positive impact for lives of the families that reside there and together be apart of preparing for our future and the future changes within our community. Although the CLI group from Gainesville, represented several residents of different neighborhoods, we chose to focus on my neighborhood and promote community unity and our theme of Empowering Community Ownership.
The Gainesville CLI Group is committed to reaching out into this neighborhood and broadening the scope of resources, communication and relationships among the residents.