The popular Neighborhood Pride Program has come to a close for Fiscal Year 2017.  This year, two (2) large projects were completed in the Cobblestone Village neighborhood near 85^th Avenue and Bloomfield Road in the Palo Verde District.  Projects are completed under the direction of staff from the Community Assistance Division.  Neighborhood Pride kicked-off on October 22, 2016, “National Make A Difference Day” and the second project took place on February 25, 2017. 

The Neighborhood Pride program was established in 1996 and is intended to stem signs of distress in generally more mature neighborhoods through resident and community partnerships.  City staff are continually successful in leveraging discounts and donations from local businesses and utilizing volunteer labor from local organizations as a force multiplier.  This year, the City’s annual program budget of $50,000 was extended by an additional $62,398 based on the value of these discounts, donations and volunteer labor.  This is a remarkable 125% budget match to the program.

Neighborhood Pride projects are selected through a data driven process that considers variables such as the concentration of foreclosed homes in the area, the volume of code enforcement cases, age of housing stock, the number of one-story homes (for volunteer safety) and the overall appearance of the neighborhood.  While taking all of these factors into account, this year’s process relied heavily on neighborhood nominations from residents. 

In total, the events provided assistance to 45 individual residences with the tireless dedication of 687 volunteers.

Listed below is a compilation of statistics for Fiscal Year 2017: