Make Community Happen!
For 45 years, New Directions has been at work to build and support strong neighborhoods and resilient families who are essential to our community’s future.
It’s been said that, “Home is an invention on which no one has yet improved.”
We agree. Ours is a bold community that envisions a future where every family has a home and every home is an asset in a thriving neighborhood.
Here’s where innovation and commitment matter: Creating the infrastructure that can deliver a home for every family in need starts with a community bold enough to envision safe, uplifting housing for all of its citizens.
Our founders nearly a half century ago knew there wouldn’t be a single solution. As a community, we needed “new directions” to build and preserve housing, to strengthen families and to engage communities to encourage civic pride and action.
Create and Sustain Housing
Welcome to Louisville and Southern Indiana. We love our bungalows, Shotgun and Victorian homes. Tour our neighborhoods and enjoy the finest American architecture.
Like laugh lines on a great face, our history is traced down our Olmstead boulevards by the evidence of thousands of families who built and hand down their beloved homes.
New Directions creates and preserves affordable housing with residents and neighborhood stakeholders. Rescuing an abandoned landmark or breathing new life into a distinctive row home—our volunteers and programs are purposed with securing and investing energy and capital to ensure that more housing is available and that all housing can be environmentally and structurally safe.
It’s a big job. We are stewards of nearly 1,000 affordable rental units. Our single-family preservation efforts annually impact 200 homes with repairs and rehabilitation—and imagine how much that matters to the elderly owner whose new wheelchair ramp can mean the difference between safety and fear. In three neighborhoods, we take on vacant homes and renew investment opportunity for families of low or moderate incomes. It is a joyous day when after a closing, the keys are handed to a new generation of homeowners readied for the legacy of neighborhood care.
Strengthen Families
Affordable housing isn’t enough.
Our dreams are larger … Employed parents, thriving children and honored elders each have important roles to play in strong neighborhoods.
Poverty threatens not just each struggling family, but our entire community. Volunteers and staff have organized place-based strategies that can connect with neighborhood strengths to advance better health, financial empowerment, sustainable habits and lifelong education in partnership with caring sponsors, donors and organizations.
Health and housing security are linked. In 2011, New Directions established a new partnership with Harambee Health Centers, Inc., a local nurse-led initiative that moves along the path of our community housing map bringing health coaching and encouragement.
Two raised gardens are up—we need 20 more along with the gardeners and teachers that can recall the sweetness and power of good food with folks too long without access.
Financial empowerment begins with protecting your family’s home. Eviction prevention is a monthly challenge met through service coordination in our rental communities so that hard-won benefits are not lost. Our transitional shelter at Heverin House is like a financial intensive care unit—pulling homeless families back into the mainstream by helping them increase income and re-establish permanent housing.
Homeowners across our region have known the “just in time” help of Repair Affair and New Directions-managed home repair and rehab programs. Over 1,500 volunteers annually dedicate themselves to helping neighbors hold onto the most important investment—their homes.
Lifelong learning is a key to success. New Directions established seven on-site Learning Centers to provide places that build and foster skills development. Every Learning Center is equipped with a computer lab that provides new technologies to seniors, children, and their families.
Four Youth Learning Centers offer after-school programs where Neighborhood Mentors and volunteers help kids complete homework every night, and summer programs ensure that field trips and daily study are possible. Mentors are able to identify children at risk of academic failure, and solutions are positive and proactive.
In our Lifelong Learning Centers, residents teach each other computer skills in the safety of Neighborhood Network Labs located just a few steps from their apartments. This education generates employment opportunities, allows them to complete their education goals, and helps allows struggling families to obtain independence and self-sufficiency.
Engage Communities
New Directions creates affordable housing and vital neighborhoods in partnership with residents and other stakeholders.
Neighborhood leaders are inspired. They see beyond today—they recall and cherish legacies of culture, stories and pride.
Working with such leaders is an honor. New Directions, a home-grown community development corporation, is a member agency of both Metro United Way and NeighborWorks® America. Working directly with grassroots leaders and stakeholders, we help strengthen neighborhood-based organizations and increase resident participation in revitalization.
The Neighborhood Roundtable, a leadership forum, meets every two months to exchange proven ideas about how to make neighborhoods stronger. Neighborhood associations also support Repair Affair, welcoming volunteers who last year alone repaired 164 homes, preventing home abandonment and threats to family safety.
We celebrate the Repair Affair’s 20th Anniversary in 2013!
Two years ago, NeighborWorks America brought 900 grassroots leaders to Louisville to learn from our grassroots leaders during its Community Leadership Institute.
We will welcome America again in May 2014 when 3,000 folks come to Louisville—again to learn from our neighborhood leaders and their progressive plans—when the NeighborWorks Training Institute convenes for five days of training, exchange and excitement. The accomplishments of The Neighborhood Roundtable and neighborhoods across the region will be on display for others to study and emulate.
Make Community Happen! Our motto is as true today as when our founders dreamed of a way to create and sustain housing and neighborhoods.
Welcome to the mission and work of New Directions Housing Corporation.
Join us!
