Hartford neighborhood beautification program
Formerly incarcerated Hartford residents could get part-time jobs beautifying Hartford’s commercial corridors in a proposed Neighborhood Ambassadors program.
HARTFORD — Formerly incarcerated Hartford residents could soon get part-time jobs beautifying Hartford’s commercial corridors through a proposed Neighborhood Ambassadors program.
The idea is modeled after the national Block by Block program that operates in downtown Hartford and more than 100 other urban districts, parks and public transit systems. In Hartford, the employees aim to keep the capital city’s Business Improvement District clean, safe and welcoming by providing a range of services, including litter pickup, graffiti removal, security patrols and free, on-site bicycle roadside assistance.
This month, Hartford said it wants to launch a similar program across the city’s other commercial corridors and partner with the city’s Re-entry Welcome Center to provide jobs to Hartford residents returning from prison.
In the first year, the city hopes to hire 10 individuals who are re-entering the community from prison, with a focus on people who lack stable housing, Sue Gunderman, Hartford’s interim director of reentry services, said in a city council committee meeting Wednesday.
Neighborhood ambassadors would work 25 hours a week, making $15 an hour.
“We really want to get those residents who are most in need for these types of jobs and this program,” Gunderman said.
Being a neighborhood ambassador would be considered a transitional job to help people along the path to permanent employment. It’s one of the city’s first steps toward creating a pipeline of
jobs out of the Re-entry Welcome Center.
“We do have a small community of employers who are willing to provide second chances. But in order to take the center to that next level and evolve from a centralized hub of resources, would be to create a structured, formalized process that includes job training, wrap-around services and stable employment,” Gunderman said.
A U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant of $162,666 would pay for the job training and services, per a resolution Hartford councilwoman Wildaliz Bermudez, of the Working Families Party, led in 2019.
On Wednesday, Bermudez said the neighborhood ambassador program was “certainly a long time coming” and that she was grateful the city would “be able to provide this to the people who are definitely one of the most in need in our community and definitely the most vulnerable.”
The city has also allocated $1.8 million over three years for the program from its share of federal American Rescue Plan funds. A small portion of that would be used this year.
With city council approval, Hartford would also apply for about $270,000 from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving to cover most of the cost of wages, equipment and administrative costs for the first year.
Job readiness training would begin in the early fall, with the first neighborhood ambassadors starting work in midfall.
“We think this is the start of a really exciting program,” Nat Gale, the city’s director of operations, said in the Wednesday meeting.
The program would be run through Love Hartford, city initiative that has grown out of several past programs to engage residents, promote resiliency and civic pride and reconnect Hartford’s neighborhoods. Love Hartford, a partnership with the Hartford Foundation, aims to build on those efforts as part of the city’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
Gale said the neighborhood ambassadors would serve 11 commercial corridors outside of the downtown Business Improvement District, with a focus on areas with small businesses.
It would operate separately from the Business Improvement District Ambassador program, which employs all Hartford residents and has previously worked with some individuals who were formerly incarcerated or had participated in rehab programs.