Love Your Block in Eastlake
Love Your Block is a tested, high-impact community service opportunity for Chula Vista residents to demonstrate their neighborhood pride, work together, and revitalize areas on their block needing attention or some extra tender loving care.
Thanks to the generous support of The Home Depot Foundation, Love Your Block will provide 20 competitive mini-grants comprised of a $500 Home Depot gift card for each grant award.
Each winning neighborhood group will purchase the needed supplies for their local improvement project and can request city services as available to support the effort.
These mini-grants encourage groups of community members to identify priority projects and develop volunteer-fueled solutions, said Chula Vista Mayor Cheryl Cox. Love Your Block engages residents in revitalizing their neighborhoods one block at a time. Engaged neighbors can act as a powerful force to improve their neighborhoods and prevent crime, while increasing
community involvement and improving quality of life.
Residents and neighbors who are interested in applying for a Love Your Block grant can download a form online at www.CVServes.org or call (619) 691-5044 to request an application be sent. Completed applications must be received by 5 p.m., September 6, 2011. Grant winners must be ready to begin their community improvement project by attending an orientation session
in mid-September and complete the project by the end of November 2011.
Project Description
Chula Vista Serves seeks neighborhood groups/organizations to develop and implement volunteer-led projects. Residents across the city are the best caretakers of their neighborhoods and the intent of Love Your Block is to foster a sense of community, belonging, and pride of ownership.
Love Your Block Applicant Criteria include:
• For the purpose of the Love Your Block campaign, a block is defined as a minimum of 10
residents in proximity to one another within the City of Chula Vista
• The group must be volunteer-led. Eligible groups include neighborhood, tenant and block associations as well as community garden groups, school, and church-based groups.
• Each group must have a detailed and realistic action plan for engaging residents to carry out a physical transformation of their block.
• Residents must implement and complete their volunteer project between September 2011 and the end of November 2011.
• Grant recipients must also commit to providing before/after pictures as well as measure specific impact, i.e., number of trees planted, number of pounds of trash collected, number of pounds of mulch distributed, square footage of graffiti removed, number of green
spaces/gardens created, number of physical resources created, and number of volunteers engaged.
Potential Projects include, but are not limited to:
• vacant lot clean-up
• weeding
• litter removal
• graffiti removal
• fence replacement/painting
• pet waste bag dispenser(s)
• tree planting (not in city right of way)
• community garden development (per city policy)
• yard sharing (private property only)
• mural painting (private property only)
• safety/security lighting/improvements (private property only)
• water conservation measures, i.e., installation of low flow sprinklers
• energy conservation measures, i.e., installation of motion detector lighting
Chula Vista is the proud recipient of a Cities of Service Leadership Grant funded by Rockefeller and Bloomberg Foundations. This grant supported the hiring of the citys first Chief Service Officer, Wanda Bailey. In March 2011, Mayor Cox and Ms. Bailey launched Chula Vista Serves.
Chula Vista Serves is a series of campaigns designed to promote strategic volunteerism with the goals of increasing civic engagement by residents and aligning volunteers with existing and new service opportunities to impact important community needs within Chula Vista. One of those new service opportunities is Love Your Block.
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Posted by Eastlaketimes on Aug 27 2011. Filed under Community of Eastlake, Eastlake News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
