Giving Compass' Take:

• Community Renewal International is an organization that uses 'friendship houses' to encourage neighbors to interact and take care of each other and strengthen community ties. 

• How can community development organizations help fight social justice issues that communities face? 

•  Read about the relationship between community development and youth development. 


Community Renewal International works to connect residents to improve life in blighted neighborhoods. The group has helped reduce crime rates, but attracting money to expand is a struggle.

To support her family, Kierston Christopher works two jobs, one as a cosmetologist and another as a school-bus driver. But she still needs help from neighbors to ensure that her seven children — four of her own and a nephew and two nieces who have been orphaned — are well cared for.

To keep them safe in their Allendale neighborhood, in the "Bottoms" section of Shreveport, La., Christopher sends them across the street to a house where they spend their afternoons after school. There they get healthy food, help with homework, and learn skills like tying their shoes and counting money. The couple that runs the place, Sharpel and Emmitt Welch, even pick up Christopher’s kids after band practice or games when she can’t.

Along with hundreds of her neighbors in Allendale, a working-class African American neighborhood long plagued by drugs, crime, and other urban ills, Christopher has come to rely on the Welches and the "friendship house" where they live and operate.

As community coordinators for Community Renewal International, an organization formed 25 years ago in several downtrodden Shreveport areas, the Welches do more than run an after-care center. They work to fulfill the organization’s primary mission: to connect neighbors in the hope that they will come to care for one another enough to collectively fix the social problems that have threatened their neighborhoods.

Community Renewal has built or converted existing structures into 10 friendship houses in the Shreveport-Bossier City region, making sure they match the aesthetics of homes already in those areas. Each friendship house serves a 30- to 40-block radius.

The Welches see Community Renewal’s work as a complement to — not a replacement for — the aid government gives to the poor. The first step toward making real and sustainable change involves getting people to see a bit of themselves in the people around them — something government programs don’t try to do.

Read the full article about friendship houses by Mike Anft at Manhattan Institute.