ABSTRACT
The National Congress of Neighborhood Women (NCNW) is an umbrella organization of local women's community groups and women leaders. NCNW's mission is to provide a voice, an organizational structure, technical assistance, training, and support to neighborhood women in their efforts to improve their lives and neighborhoods. The focus has not been on housing issues, but on the empowerment of neighborhood women in every area of concern to them. In this chapter, the authors focus on the obstacle course neighborhood women negotiated each day just to survive, they aim to decide that the obstacle course itself had to change comprehensively. Bertha Gilkey demonstrated that public housing could be well-managed by trained residents organized to enforce community-developed standards. New comprehensive community development strategy stresses neighborhood women's leadership and values, group discipline, self-help and the use of the political system to advantage.
