Vivan Bui, a first-year student in Cal Poly Pomona's pre-credential program, helps Kimberly Hernandez, 7, with her spelling at Garey Village.

Maricruz Hernandez used to feel helpless as she listened to neighbors fight and watched stray dogs run loose along her south Pomona street. She didn't know who to complain to or what law enforcement and city services were available to her. But now, with the assistance of Project Renaissance, Hernandez feels empowered to affect positive change in her neighborhood.

"At first I didn't know how to help my community. Since I've been taking a lot of parenting, leadership and English as a Second Language classes, now I do," says Hernandez, a 47-year-old mother of three who runs a day care center from her home in the Angela-Chanslor neighborhood of Pomona.

Project Renaissance is a joint community outreach effort by Cal Poly Pomona, the city of Pomona and Pomona Unified School District intended to strengthen and revitalize a neglected neighborhood in south Pomona, bound by Angela and Chanslor streets.

The outreach program is a multi-year commitment involving hundreds of faculty, staff and students from across Cal Poly Pomona's disciplines, with professor Aubrey Fine as the program director. The university, with the help of other entities, provides individuals in the Angela-Chanslor neighborhood with job training and educational opportunities as well as increased access to social and health services.

"We named it Project Renaissance because it's the rebirth of a community," says Fine, director of the university's Service Learning Center. "This is a neighborhood that is at tremendous risk. It has a lot of blight, a lot of poverty and a lot of crime. Our goal is to help the neighborhood become more self-supporting and safe, and to empower the residents to make their community more livable and enjoyable."

A secondary project goal is to provide Cal Poly Pomona students with service learning opportunities that connect with their classroom experience, says Fine.

With the support of Rep. Gary Miller (R-Diamond Bar), Cal Poly Pomona was awarded a nearly $400,000 grant last year from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to create a Community Outreach Partnership Center, referred to as Project Renaissance. Other partners contributing to this project include Mt. San Antonio College, Pomona Police Department, Pomona Public Library and Western University of Health Sciences.

The center provides free adult tutoring in literacy, parenting and computer skills. Children who visit the center receive homework assistance and participate in drug and violence prevention programs, peer theater groups and college outreach activities.

In addition, Project Renaissance developed a family services information and referral program that offers physical examinations and health screenings, medical and social service referrals, and education on nutrition, drugs and alcohol, and sexually transmitted disease prevention.

To help with neighborhood revitalization efforts, the center also provides civic education and leadership development training. As a result, residents have formed neighborhood action teams that coordinate community improvement projects.

The center currently serves more than 220 families. Although its focus is to revitalize the Angela-Chanslor neighborhood, services are available to all Pomona residents.

"There has been a real increase in awareness among residents who have participated in the leadership program," says urban and regional planning professor Gwen Urey, who coordinates neighborhood revitalization and safety issues for Project Renaissance. "They have a better understanding of how the city and the world work, and many of them have aspirations of their children going to college one day."

Urey recently taught a course called Angela-Chanslor Planning and Design Studio, where students researched better use of the neighborhood's public space and participated in a street and alley clean up.

Cal Poly Pomona senior Antonio Castillo, who took Urey's course, hopes to one day work in a community development department assisting neighborhoods similar to Angela-Chanslor's.

"On clean-up day, many of the residents watched as we cleaned up their neighborhood and alleys, and sure enough they came out with their own brooms," Castillo recalls. "We realized that as we became more interested in their environment, they became more involved.

"The neighborhood, despite the condition it's in, has a lot of potential. There are residents who are not informed but are very much willing to become involved," he says. "We just need to show them how."

For more information about Project Renaissance, or to become a volunteer, contact Ana Gonzalez at (909) 397-5060, ext. 3867.