Meeting the Needs of Our Nation’s Neighborhoods: a Tribute

Grassroots efforts to solve social problems in Alaskan fishing towns, inner-city Philadelphia neighborhoods, American Indian reservations, and elsewhere are featured in a book, Web site, and traveling museum exhibit financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“Indivisible: Stories of American Communities” was produced with a $2.4-million grant to the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona contributed to the effort.

To show how people are working to improve conditions in their own neighborhoods, photographers and interviewers visited 12 organizations, including:

• Navajo Lifeways, an Arizona organization that is helping to revive sheep farming among the Navajo.
• Communities in Harmony Advocating for Learning and Kids, or CHALK, an organization in San Francisco that runs a toll-free telephone service where young people help their peers obtain information about drug and alcohol abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, and suicidal thoughts.
• HandMade in America, a nonprofit group that works in North Carolina to improve economic development in small towns, largely by promoting the region’s tradition of creating finely handcrafted furniture, clothing, and other objects.

The exhibit opened last month at the Terra Museum of American Art, in Chicago, and will visit seven other cities. A postcard version of the exhibit is also being mounted in train stations, libraries, airports, and other public spaces.

Local Heroes Changing America, a book of the photographs, along with an audio compact disc containing excerpts from interviews with community leaders, has just been published by W.W. Norton & Company.

The project’s Web site, http://www.indivisible.org, also includes photographs, interview recordings, and links to suggestions on how visitors can get involved in civic life, as well as a resource guide for elementary and secondary teachers who want to use the exhibit as a classroom tool.