Uplifting Community Voices in the 29th Street Thrive Area

The 29th Street Thrive Promotore (ambassador) cohort--a group of dedicated and ambitious community members committed to reaching people in their area and building community power

Over the past year, we’ve been working on the City of Tucson’s 29th Street Thrive initiative as part of the consultant team selected to support planning and community engagement efforts led by the City’s Housing & Community Development Department. 29th Street Thrive is intended to facilitate comprehensive neighborhood planning and resident-driven investment in the neighborhoods along 29th Street between Alvernon Way and Craycroft Road (between 22nd St. and Golf Links Rd.). This effort goes beyond typical neighborhood planning and looks holistically at a place, identifying a vision to transform both the physical environment and to create opportunities for residents to thrive through education, services, and jobs.

Our role on the team has been focused on designing and growing equitable community engagement with people who live in or are connected to the project area for the primary purposes of: 1) building community capacity, 2) identifying community needs and wants to be incorporated into the Transformation Plan, and 3) to identify a short list of more immediate, near-term projects that community members would want to see implemented as Action Activities. With our commitment to equity as the guidepost over the past ten months, we’ve been able to establish working relationships with key community partners in the area, bring together and support a powerful and dedicated team of six promotores (community ambassadors), deliver nine family-friendly engagement events in the Thrive Zone, and facilitate a community-driven decision-making process for the Action Activity selection. We’ve engaged with over 1,300 community members to learn about their challenges and visions for their neighborhoods and facilitated multi-generational engagement in seven different languages.

The promotore program has been an amazing experience for everyone involved, including us! We designed and facilitated a four-week training program with the promotores where we spent time getting to know one another and building trust, learning about the 29th Street Thrive project objectives, sharing the basics of community engagement, mapping power along race and ethnicity by looking at past policies in the area, and supporting each promotore in the design of their own community engagement events.

The events were a hit! Some were larger-scale gatherings at neighborhood parks that attracted hundreds of people—like Cash Lansky’s Community Time on Deuce Nine featuring free food from beloved area restaurant Ken’s BBQ, jumping castles and games for kids, a live DJ, kickball, and more. Other events were small living room conversations hosted at the homes of promotores like Kusha and Desirae where we had the opportunity to have more in-depth conversations with area residents. Through this collaborative effort we were able to connect with large numbers of refugee families who have been settled in the Thrive Zone and low-income renters who live in apartment complexes in the area. We heard first-hand information, like concerns regarding shortcomings of under-resourced refugee support services or severe housing violations, from people whom we might not have been able to reach otherwise through more traditional engagement. This input prompted the project team to develop early Action Activity ideas to address these issues.

This spring, eight Action Activities were prioritized for funding by a Working Group comprised of the promotores, representatives from community partner organizations, and broader community members—pushing for a shift from community consultation to community power. The City will now move forward with getting Action Activities implemented by the end of 2026 while finalizing a Transformation Plan which will include the many additional ideas we heard from community members. The Plan will be an important tool to help guide future investments while leveraging additional funding to bring to the area. While there is still much work to be done, we are building on the mutual success of what we and the broader team have been able to accomplish together.