"Alexa?" a retired resident says to the digital assistant sitting on the table. "Tell me a joke."

Alexa, a cloud-based voice service, might respond with the one about the cat who stopped playing basketball. (Why? He threw up too many hairballs.) Or the one about how people survived before sandpaper. (They roughed it.)

The seniors living in Lackawanna County don't want to leave the homes they've known for years. NeighborWorks Northeastern Pennsylvania (NWNEPA) doesn't want them to have to leave either; that's why they formalized an Aging in Place program that began in 2018.

Older residents living in the communities built and maintained by St. Mary Development in Dayton, Ohio, were afraid to leave home – and had been advised not to. They were concerned about public transportation. They were advised not to go to grocery stores. But they needed food. A number of organizations partnered to get it to them.
 

Since 1993, NeighborWorks America has convened over 15,000 lower-income resident leaders at its annual Community Leadership Institute (CLI). The nation's largest effort to amplify resident voices equips these leaders with the tools, seed funding and network of support they need to drive changes in their neighborhoods. 

Foundation Communities' (FC) Supper Clubs in Austin, Texas, provide a host of opportunities, says Meghan Hein, community building volunteer coordinator. The dinners, cooked by volunteer groups that range from churches to businesses to book clubs, help residents in FC's affordable housing get warm, healthy meals and stretch their food budgets. With residents and volunteers dining together, there's also a chance to meet other people, talk, and build relationships with the Austin community.

At their core, nonprofits are set up to help people. But in times like this, the need for help can be overwhelming. Here’s how two NeighborWorks organizations are working to meet the needs of their communities and the needs of their staffs.

On Friday, Chinatown CDC launched a take-out meal program to get dinners to residents in their single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels. The meals, provided by New Asia, a dim sum and community banquet restaurant located in Chinatown, allowed residents to avoid communal kitchens on their floors, a typical setup for the SRO hotels. And that helped residents maintain the physical distance suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help curb the spread of COVID-19.

Neighborhood. Porch. Living room. That's where James Clark, head of the St. Louis Metropolitan Area De-escalation Center, says we must go to talk about gun violence within communities. And that's where his outreach workers have been going for the past two and a half years. 

The black community is facing an internal crisis, Clark says. "African-Americans have to look at the fact that African-Americans kill African-Americans every day in every major city. We can't ignore that. Not to address it is passing it on to future generations."