Greater Riverdale: A Place-based Initiative to Elevate Health
What We Did
- Visioning
- Community Engagement
- Research
- Capacity Building
Partners
- Kaiser Permanente
- Maryland NonProfits
- Enterprise
- Central Kenilworth Avenue Revitalization
Supporters
- Town of Riverdale Park
- Crestwood
- Madison Hill
- Riverdale Heights
- Riverdale Hills
- Eastpines
- Templeton Knolls
- Roswil
- Beacon Heights
- Woodlawn
- West Lanham Hills
- Hanson Oaks
The Challenge: making a great place greater — a large-scale effort to lift up community.
Comprising twelve neighborhoods in Prince George’s County, Maryland, Greater Riverdale is what its residents describe as “a wonderful community.” With its diversity, accessible transit, and proximity to Washington, DC and other Prince George’s County neighborhoods, Greater Riverdale has much to offer those who live, work, and visit the community. Yet, while the community has numerous strengths, other areas could use investment to improve the community’s health.
The Vision: pinpoint areas in need of investment and craft comprehensive strategies for sustainable growth.
Supported by a grant from Kaiser Permanente, Greater Riverdale’s collective neighborhoods collaborated to forge partner connections and create a cohesive vision to strategically steer community investment.
The Plan: understand what health means from many perspectives.
The Neighborhood Design Center’s role was to collaborate with the communities to understand what health looked like from their perspective and what type of investments would be needed to support those views of health as they defined them.
Community Engagement
Our contribution was not to design a building or public space, but to make recommendations and develop implementation mechanisms.
Focus Areas
Safety
School safety, gang presence, barriers to reporting, and crimes targeting specific groups were areas of concern.
Streets
The community desired an intra-connected neighborhood, safer streets for pedestrians, and increased street trees.
Kinship
It is important to Bridge communication gaps across language barriers, create a representation that reflects the current community, and promote inclusivity of all ages.
Schools
Support for students’ mental and physical health, consideration of various languages and cultures, and gaps in afterschool programming were some areas that needed to be strengthened in the community’s schools.
Stable futures
The community wants to address housing affordability, aging in place, and economic opportunities to create a stable community where residents can live, grow and stay.
Bringing many groups together
Of the 12 communities defined within Greater Riverdale’s boundaries, each has its own community associations and geographies. In addition, the communities included faith leaders, nonprofit leaders, elected officials, and agency partners that, as the work progressed, began to be called the coalition of community leaders.
NDC’s goal was to bring the groups together and, instead of erasing their individual accomplishments, see their communities as linked to something larger and understand how they could work together to elevate the entire area.
One of the primary recommendations was to tie these organizations into a formal group requiring investment, money, and training to help move the initiatives forward.
The Future: programming, public space improvements, and a coalition up to the task.
The group identified needs to support the five focus areas, ranging from community classes and neighborhood watch programs to pedestrian-level lighting, street signage in multiple languages, and much more.
Tackling each focus area is a huge undertaking, and NDC’s work helped create a framework that the coalition of community leaders and other advocates could move forward with either on their own, through partnership, or advocacy.
The work has resulted in significant outcomes. The community engagement, which occurred in the 9 months leading up to the outbreak of the 2020 pandemic, successfully generated a sense of community leadership connection, shared values and a shared understanding of the desired future state of Greater Riverdale.
When the pandemic hit, the pieces were in place to galvanize and organize quickly to respond to urgent community needs. The initiative ‘Greater Riverdale Cares’ emerged from this network as a mutual aid organization during the COVID-19 pandemic supporting both restaurant owners and families in need of food in the area Greater Riverdale Thrives is another outgrowth of this work and is a “non-partisan, inclusive and thriving network of people working together to advocate, collaborate, share resources, and serve as a collective voice to uplift the Greater Riverdale community.”
Since its inception, in collaboration with partners, the group has organized community events and gatherings, health fairs, mental health initiatives, and a summer program.
Pastor Mike Dickson, Founding President & Executive Director of Metamorphosis Community Project, an embedded nonprofit that is taking over some of Greater Riverdale Thrives’ responsibilities, emphasized the positive impact of collaboration between Kaiser, NDC, and other partners in creating a functional and independent structure. He said, “A lot of research, assessment and engaging the community went into this before we came to be. We always want to remember where we came from and those whose shoulders we stand on.”
“The wonderful thing is the obvious investment and collaboration between Kaiser, NDC and the partners to create something that can function independently. Greater Riverdale Thrives would be impossible without the groundwork laid, and we hope it can serve as a model for other communities.”
— Pastor Mike Dickson, Metamorphosis Community Project, contributer to Greater Riverdale Thrives
Were you involved in this project? We’d love to hear about your experience and add your perspective to this case study! Please reach out to socialmedia@ndc-md.org.