Community Engagement

Collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships is a cornerstone of the New Neighbors Network. Through Netter, we recruit dedicated, motivated and well-compensated workers for our many projects. Netter collaborators are usually Penn undergrads, although not exclusively. All receive financial assistance from Penn, coming in the form of $15-per hour ($25 for graduate students) work assignments designed by the students themselves. Students are paid to do research, make visits into the community, recruit Penn faculty as advisers and prepare finished reports in support of 501 © 3 non-profits in Philadelphia and beyond.

One recent project had our Netter collaborators produce brochures in the Ethiopian languages Tigrinya and Amharic that enable homeowners from immigrant communities to take advantage of businesses offering discounts on building supplies. That was part of a New Neighbors Network effort at increasing the speed, and lowering the cost, of housing rehabilitation in West Philadelphia. One Netter collaborator working on her Master’s Degree in city planning prepared a comprehensive study of Philadelphia’s Ethiopian homeowner community, highlighting such things as affordability and proximity to building supply vendors. Her study also looked at correlations between property rehabilitation and crime prevention.

The community engagement component of New Neighbors Network is only beginning to be tapped. In 2023 we began work internationally, also supported by Netter collaborators. Among the new projects being launched is a refugee baseball tournament in Costa Rica, where some 500,000 recent arrivals from baseball-loving Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Colombia and the Dominican Republic often feel stranded in a soccer-mad country. New Neighbors Network sees an opportunity to raise Costa Ricans’ awareness of these expatriate communities while partnering with IOM’s mission in San Jose, as well as with Major League Baseball (which manufactures in Costa Rica all balls used in professional games). We have begun outreach to Latino big leaguers to participate in the tournament as coaches and trainers. The target date for that event is January 2026.

Another area with Netter collaborators is diaspora engagement in Philadelphia, where an archipelago of tiny non-profits is being incubated around the kitchen tables of migrants’ homes, worksites and places of worship. These include groups like Rebound Liberia of West Africa which was launched by a trio of Penn undergrads (one Liberian, the others Nigerian) to empower women in West Africa through sports. Another is the Norah Anena Foundation, which was founded by a Ugandan immigrant, now a nurse, who lives on Philadelphia’s Mechanic St.

Many similar groups have risen from refugee households from Latin America, Asia and Ukraine. They work in nutrition, medicine, community development both in the US and in the “sender” villages who seek their aid. These organizations can be your partners for positive change. Let us hook you up.