H.O.P.E. (Help Our People Excel) Learning Center, a project with EI partner, Project NOW
The Urban Initiative is a long-term commitment to identifying and evolving more viable systems for healthy human sustenance and development.
- The Evolution Institute’s Urban Initiative is a systematic approach to helping create the conditions for sustainable community development.
- This effort will incorporate common work-planning tools and evaluation processes to clarify purpose and tangible results.
- We follow best practices as identified in the research literature on community development and engagement. These are listed in the appendices.
- We assess our work using validated, field-based research methods.
- The process and implementation of strategies to advance well-being can be more fully understood through the lens of evolutionary theory and science than through empirical means alone.
- Effective community initiatives that advance the well-being of the community and the residents need to address political, economic, and social domains.
- Our advisory board will be representative of the communities in which the EI is working and will include residents, academics, professionals, and others who have a stake in the process.
HOPE Learning Center features a computer lab for computer classes, GED preparation, resume services, and more.
The primary criterion for assessing impact addresses the question of whether our collaborative efforts lead to community improvement for the residents. Although gentrification may lead to improvements in the community, it does so through displacement of current residents and has little or no positive impact on the quality of life on their lives.