Our passion: to make urban neighborhoods vital, healthy environments that strengthen individuals and support families.

Our vision: the neighborhood is the basic building block of a successful city. In a successful city, the walking-distance neighborhood surrounds the child at every stage of development with an environment that is clean, safe, and beautiful. It is culturally diverse and stimulating. Successful adults abound as role models because they choose to stay even after their economic success allows them to live anywhere.

Our strategy: achieve a critical mass of good influences by addressing many things at the same time in the same neighborhood:

• Preschool education – building the capacity for a lifetime of success
• Youth development programs – happy, confident young people do not destroy
• Adult education – giving low income adults the skills to compete
• Community organization –people gain the means to control the future of their neighborhood
• Blight reduction – eliminate or reduce factors that encourage crime and discourage home ownership
• Infrastructure development – create parks and community centers that build community pride and support human development; rebuild alleys and streetscapes to add value to the neighborhood
• Improve housing stock – give residents access to loan and grant programs; bring in collaborators that build housing with an shared community development plan

We do this by:

• Recognizing the neighborhood as the principal client
• Being a complex organization, addressing human and community development at the same time in the same place
• Collaborating with other agencies so that many kinds of expertise address the same neighborhood in the same time frame

UNI is an organization embracing integrity, hope, compassion and diversity to strengthen individuals, support families, and build communities.