Project Description:

The Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative (LANI) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to jump-starting community-driven neighborhood revitalization. LANI accomplishes this by providing designated declining communities with:

* Seed funding for improvement projects;
* Hands-on training in project planning and implementation; and
* Technical assistance in the development and support of sustainable community organizations.

This project will assist two of LANI's 13 existing project areas, Boyle Heights and the Vernon-Central Historic District which are urban, economically-challenged neighborhoods struggling against divestment, inadequate job bases, crime, poverty, and blight. These two communities are located within the Empowerment Zone and represent the broad cultural and physical range of its under-served neighborhoods. These neighborhoods match the profile the digital divide impacts most in that they are inner-city communities, average about 40% Latino, about 8% African-American, and are primarily low-income, with about one-quarter living below the federal poverty threshold.

Combining LANI's network of neighborhood stakeholders with USC's access to technology, information, research, and skilled students, this project will:

* Build community stakeholder groups' technological capacity through increased computer and Internet exposure, access, and training opportunities.
* Strengthen LANI's successful neighborhood revitalization approach, thereby enhancing its ability to serve needy communities, by employing Internet technology to meet the organization's pressing need for increased information dissemination and sharing.
* Foster a national "learning community" on stakeholder decision-making, responding to requests from around the country for detailed information on LANI's national model for community partnerships, which LANI is currently unable to adequately address.

Joyce Perkins, LANI's co-founder and Executive Director, will oversee LANI's involvement in the project. Ms. Perkins helped design LANI's community decision-making component, drawing on her ten years as a community leader in Los Angeles' Crenshaw district. In keeping with its program design and commitment to substantive community decision-making, LANI's established community stakeholder groups will participate in designing and implementing this project. Having worked with their broader communities and LANI to implement more than $8 million in community improvement projects since 1994, these stakeholders have made decisions, met deadlines, produced deliverables, and reached-out to their communities, and are therefore well equipped for participation in this project.

This project will incorporate the following components:

* Creating an interactive LANI web site for use by communities locally and nationwide;
* Working with the two communities to obtain donated computer hardware and software;
* Providing communities with computer and Internet training; and
* Updating and revising the web site throughout the project period.

Finally, the partners will evaluate (and disseminate) the project's impacts in the two diverse target neighborhoods, assessing the effectiveness of this innovative response to bridging the digital divide, which uses technological capacity-building in the service of community revitalization.

Activity Report - "Narrowing the Digital Divide in Boyle Heights and the Vernon-Central Historic District"

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