These two visioning events bookend more than a decade of crucial conversations. But in order to understand the local culture of dialogue, you have to go back even further — almost fifty years. As the flight of white neighbors to the suburbs accelerated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and as crucial industrial sites in the neighborhood gradually began to decline, a group of ministers rallied neighbors to form a neighborhood organization that would eventually become the Near Eastside Community Organization (NESCO). One of the organizing leaders, Dick Moore, recalls that, in those early years, “We had very little idea what we were doing, or how to get it done — but we met, and talked.” NESCO would keep these conversations going over the next five decades, and would be a hub for neighborhood life and for advocating for the Near Eastside’s neighbors on the margins. Although the exodus of neighbors and the decline of the neighborhood would accelerate over the 1980s and 1990s — leading the Near Eastside in the early 2000s to be among state and national leaders in foreclosures and abandoned properties — NESCO worked diligently to resist this decline and keep neighbors connected.

After the Near Eastside was declared a redevelopment zone in 2006, a designation that typically puts a neighborhood on the fast track toward hyper-gentrification, NESCO and other organizations across the Near Eastside worked together to rally neighbors to gather for the first visioning event in June 2007. These groups specifically focused on gathering as many neighbors as possible, and as diverse a group as possible. For those who needed it, transportation and childcare were provided. Translators were also provided so that Hispanic neighbors could participate in the conversations. After a welcome, neighbors sorted themselves into smaller table conversations on topics vital to the future of the neighborhood. The conversations at the initial visioning event yielded seven key areas within which the neighborhood wanted to focus its energy over the coming years:

Affordable Housing Business and Economic Development Education Family Strengthening Leadership and Neighborhood Connections Livability Public Safety

In the months immediately after, Near Eastside neighbors worked together in conversation to flesh out these areas with specific objectives and they assigned neighborhood groups that would take the lead on each objective. Bill Taft, who at that time was the executive director of the Indianapolis office of the Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC) — a major funder of the work envisioned in the Near Eastside plan — recalls that this structure was helpful for bringing the neighborhood’s vision to reality: “We put a big emphasis on results-based accountability. When goals were put into the plans, you could measure results, identify actions, say who the leader was, give the time frame within which each would be completed, and say how completion would be defined.”

Over the last decade the quality of life plan has been a living document that has guided the neighborhood through a season of transformation. The plan served to “regularly inform the strategic decisions of neighborhood leaders as a roadmap to guide investors and other potential partners interested in helping us accomplish our neighborhood goals.” As a result, hundreds of units of affordable housing have been developed for home ownership or rental, a neighborhood elementary school has been launched, and the neighborhood was selected as the site of the high-profile Super Bowl XLVI legacy project, which accelerated a number of development projects on the Near Eastside.

At quarterly summits, neighbors have gathered for conversation, working together to evaluate, adapt, and amend the plan. The following graphic shows how a Near Eastside neighbor or group can add an objective to the plan, or adapt the plan to address an issue that faces the neighborhood