Garfield Council aims for safer Kedzie How do you announce to the neighborhood that an inner-city commerical corridor with a dicey reputation is now

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Garfield Council aims for safer Kedzie

How do you announce to the neighborhood that an inner-city commerical corridor with a dicey reputation is now safe for strolling and shopping? By staging a bunch of musical performances for starters. That's just one of the tricks the Garfield Park Community Council has up its sleeve to boost the Kedzie Avenue/Lake Street intersection. Read about the others.

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A growthful enterprise on Perry Street

There's plenty of open land in the Washington Park neighborhood and Brandon Johnson figured out what to do with some of it. The executive director of the Washington Park Consortium has teamed up with the Resource Center's Ken Dunn to create a 1.7 acre farm, growing produce for some of the city's finest restaurateurs. Here's how they did it.

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Contractor Juan Rubio and two of his neice tenants on balcony of S Rockwell rehab hi res

Neighborhood recovery, one building at a time

It's been years since foreclosures began tearing apart the fabric of many Chicago neighborhoods, and clearly it'll be years before they're made whole. But slowly - very slowly - the wheels are turning and contractors such as Jose Rubio in Chicago Lawn are the ones shifting the gears. He's part of a tapestry of efforts, focused through Chicago's Micro-Market Recovery Program, doing the painstaking work of rebuilding communities, block-by-block or even house-by-house. Here's his story.

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Altgeld Park, Little Village sport new fields

Community football and soccer fields are great places to get exercise and have fun, but they can serve some important social functions, too, such as providing places where neighbors can come together and engage with each other in ways that have less to do with sports than with community building. Check out how that's happening in a couple of Chicago neighborhoods.

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School garden provides food for thought

If you are what you eat, students at Reavis Elementary School last summer got a good sense of personal identity through a program run by the Chicago Botanic Garden. In it, they learned to plant, cultivate and harvest vegetables, herbs and other edibles. Then they chopped them up and ate them. Yum! See how they did it. The urban ag course was administered by the Elev8 program, which was one of 24 national educational initiatives to recently receive the U.S. Dept. of Education's Together for Tomorrow School Improvement Challenge award.

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New executive directors in Woodlawn, Englewood

Wesley Walker, a community development veteran with extensive experience in Chicago and the Twin Cities, is the new executive director at the Network of Woodlawn, the lead agency that's administering LISC Chicago's New Communities Program in that South Side neighborhood.

And Juandalyn Holland is the new executive director at Teamwork Englewood, the NCP lead agency in Englewood. She previously worked on prisoner re-entry programs at Teamwork and elsewhere.

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New LISC Chicago board members

An enthusiastic welcome to Robert Jank (Northern Trust), Karin Norington-Reaves (Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership), Juan Salgado (Instituto del Progreso Latino), and Richard Sciortino (Brinshore Development), who recently joined LISC Chicago's Board of Advisors.

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Save the date!

The 19th annual Chicago Neighborhood Development Awards ceremony will be Wednesday, February 13, 2013, at the Chicago Hilton & Towers, 720 S. Michigan Ave. Online registration begins in January.

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