youth

South Camden may not normally evoke images of verdant foliage and bountiful vegetable gardens. With an assortment of industries, an incinerator, a sewage treatment plant, and toxic areas including two federal Superfund sites, the neighborhood is severely affected by pollution. Respiratory and other health ailments are widespread, and neighborhood groups have decried the environmental racism that has rendered their very air a dire health hazard.

The Houston Community Center carries on a long and illustrious tradition of social service in this ethnically diverse South Philadelphia neighborhood. Founded in 1901 as St. Martha’s House, the organization functioned as a settlement house serving the predominantly Italian and Eastern European immigrant communities of the area. St. Martha’s provided education and health services and emphasized “integration and assimilation” programs for immigrants intended to ease their transition into an unfamiliar city and culture.

In 1949, interracial cooperative living was a radical idea in Philadelphia. The Friends Housing Cooperative transformed this concept into practice. Founded by the Friends Neighborhood Guild and the American Friends Service Committee—both Quaker organizations—to provide low-income collective housing for black and white families years before the organized Civil Rights Movement came to prominence, the Friends Housing Cooperative was a community of people who lived their ideals.

Historic Cliveden Park sits in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia, a few blocks from the site of the Battle of Germantown during the Revolutionary War. And in the park sits an enormous oak tree estimated at over two hundred years old that neighbors call their "tree of life." Across generations, the park has been a place where residents of East Mt. Airy, through their care and upkeep of this green space, show their love for their community and each other.

Frankford, one of the oldest communities in the county that came to be called Philadelphia, has a rich legacy of involvement in the Underground Railroad. Located just above the Mason-Dixon line, Pennsylvania—and Philadelphia in particular—was a major hub of anti-slavery activity. An 1830 Black political convention in Philadelphia to protest and organize against slavery encouraged abolitionists to use churches as sanctuaries for fugitive slaves. Next Stop: Freedom was shot by a group of Philadelphia high school students. They focus on Campbell A.M.E.

A youth group from Woodrock, Inc. created this video to explore and document the high rate of school drop-outs among their peers. Students and drop-outs of Edison High School discuss issues of daily concern, such as peer pressure, the desire to earn fast cash, lack of parental involvement, teenage pregnancy and a lack of teacher effectiveness. With so many burdens weighing them down, how do they make a clear-headed decision to school...or not to school?