ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an historical overview of neighbourhood-based services, those services rooted institutionally and socially in low-income neighbourhoods. Neighbourhood-based services never disappeared completely. At least until the late 1950s most poor neighbourhoods sustained a diverse set of recreational and cultural programs for children and youth, public health nurses continued to visit young families, and vestiges of street-corner social work with gangs persisted. Specific programs created as part of the federal government's War on Poverty provided the infrastructure and defined the priorities of efforts to renew neighbourhood-based services in the 1960s. Neighbourhood-based services remerged in the mid-1960s with the War on Poverty. During the 1970s and 1980s neighbourhood-based services continued to grow, idiosyncratically, in thousands of local communities, usually as a local response to a community need. Borrowing from the past and reinventing, individuals and agencies developed parenting support programs, community schools, youth programs, school-based health clinics, and after-school programs.
