In , the five-year-old Cantori was enrolled in the first test run of Head Start, an eight-week summer program that became a school-year program immediately following the pilot effort. Looking back, Walker sees what Head Start did for him.
In fact, the Ford Foundation also initiated and funded the Gray Areas Program, originally a six-city pilot effort directed by Ford program officer Paul Ylvisaker that was the precursor for the Community Action Program.
Walker himself joined the leadership of the Abyssinian Development Corporation in Harlem, which received grant support from the Ford Foundation and through the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a community development intermediary that also emerged from Ford. Contrary to the views of ideological critics, the innovations of the original Gray Areas Program agencies in Boston, New Haven, Chicago, and Oakland and the advances of the original Special Impact Program CDCs were not top-down engineering, but locally directed efforts taking advantage of desperately needed national support, in the form of OEO and other program resources, to be fitted to the needs of different localities.
Florence Tandy directs the Northern Kentucky Community Action Commission , exemplifying the imperative of working with communities on the needs and issues they face, hardly a one-size-fits-all template.
We cannot afford to lose it. Lil Dupree left a job in community banking to join the community action agency in Kalispell, Montana, now called the Community Action Partnership of Northwest Montana , and after a stint at a national organization in Washington, D. Now a well-known writer and nonprofit consultant in Oregon , Kathi Jaworski started as a VISTA worker fresh out of school in the North of Howard area in Chicago doing tenant organizing, but years later found herself coming full circle to chair the board of a community action agency in Franklin County, Massachusetts, as it worked through leadership transition issues.
