Building Our Lives Together
Empowering a Future Where Every Neighborhood Thrives
Fast Facts
Philadelphia, PA
Connie Liu and Ken Inadomi
2022-23, 2024, 2025
Education
How Building Our Lives Together (BOLT) Is Making a Difference
BOLT empowers local leaders in low-income, BIPOC communities in Philadelphia, the poorest large city in America, to lead changes their neighborhoods want to see. These Proximate leaders are individuals who live in and work with and for their communities.
Proximate leaders are often under-resourced because they are stereotyped as “small” or “risky” or “low-impact.” These leaders need educational opportunities to gain the skills, network, and capital to operate effectively and sustainably. BOLT concentrates on meeting these needs.
Once proven as a poverty-alleviation solution that can be scaled, BOLT seeks to bring its model to other cities.
What BOLT Does
- Teaches how to build a movement and mobilize people to act through a community organizing curriculum.
- Focuses it strategic management curriculum on building strategies to achieve strong and effective social impact organizations.
- Provides a curriculum on navigating the local ecosystem in Philadelphia that covers the Philadelphia Ward System and its ties to decisions made at City Hall and the Philadelphia Land Bank, which controls the city’s vacant lots.
Initiatives Supported by Project Redwood
2022-23: $20,000 to help fund the first year of operation for the BOLT School for Grassroots Leadership, an 8-month capacity-building program for proximate leaders in underserved Philadelphia neighborhoods, and the provision of stipends for participants.
2024: $50,000 to help fund the training of additional proximate leaders, utilizing the BOLT School for Grassroots Leadership’s updated leadership curriculum, which had been refined after BOLT’s first year of experience to aim at ending generational poverty.
2025: $40,000 to fund the integration of the BOLT School for Grassroots Leadership into Philadelphia public schools, using a train-the-trainer model, to directly support low-income students. This will help build on the BOLT Youth Leaders Fellowship, which focuses on youth mentorship, job creation and economic mobility, and will also help fund the expansion of alumni programming to support graduates of the program.