Greetings, friends! Over the past 10 months I have been asked dozens of times what is next with my lifelong work of coming alongside community to create healthy, vibrant places. The types of places that we all want for our kids and families. For 25 years I was afforded a tremendous privilege to work alongside my neighbors (who became my closest friends) to create an audacious vision of taking the neighborhood we were living and raising our kids in from a place of chronic private and public disinvestment to one rich in amenities, great public spaces and great schools, all while ensuring that those who had lived there all along were the primary beneficiaries of the work. Fast forward and we, alongside hundreds of families and dozens of partners, had collectively created Tulsa's only inclusively grown neighborhood.
Through those 25 years I was constantly drawn to a question: why can't all kids experience this? With the level of resource this country has, why can we not see more communities flourishing?
This past Spring, I quietly launched my own organization called Cerca Solutions . "Cerca" is the Spanish word for "close" or "proximate" (though, comically, it is also the word for "fence"). Proximity, in my experience, is one of the key values of getting to more vibrant communities. It helped me to discover that though many of my neighbors were living with a much different set of financial resources than I was, they wanted the exact same things I wanted for my kids - safe, amenity-rich places to play, great community-centered schools, and retail spaces that reflected our needs.
The past ten months I have had dozens of conversations and have realized a huge hunger for communities all across the country to get to that state of vibrancy. So, we have begun assembling a team of people with expertise in housing and real estate development, education success, impact measurement, leadership development and beyond in order to help as many communities see their vision become a reality as possible.
Additionally, we have big plans to produce content to help drive the dissemination of knowledge and evoke forward thought around comprehensive and inclusive neighborhood development. Stay tuned as we roll this out, but if you or your community are interested in our services, please check out our website at www.cerca.solutions
