2011 All-America City award winners announced
Ten cities have received the “All-America City” designation from the Denver-based National Civic League (NCL). The award is given each year to towns, cities, counties, neighborhoods and metropolitan regions in recognition of their civic accomplishments.
The 10 winners are: Kenai, Alaska; Dublin, Calif.; Lakewood, Colo.; Belleville, Ill.; South Bend, Ind.; Scott City, Kan.; Tupelo, Miss.; Fayetteville, N.C.; Eden, N.C.; and Fort Worth, Texas. To be selected, each community had to make a presentation to a jury of civic experts from the public, private and nonprofit sectors listing three programs in their communities that demonstrate collaborative community problem solving.
The examples covered a range of issues, including grizzly bear protection in Kenai, homelessness in Fort Worth, and a plan to promote economic development through patriotism in Fayetteville. “These communities give us hope and new ideas about what can be accomplished when ordinary people work together to address the difficult challenges that lay ahead,” NCL President Gloria Rubio-Cortés said in a statement.
More than 600 communities across the country have received the All-America City Award. Since 1949, the awards program has recognized neighborhoods, villages, towns, cities, counties and metro regions for outstanding civic accomplishments. To win, communities have to demonstrate their ability to address serious challenges with innovative, grassroots strategies that promote civic engagement and cooperation between the public, private and nonprofit sectors.
For next year’s All-America City Awards, NCL will work with the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading to focus on the issue of grade-level reading preparedness. “This will be a new experience for us,” Rubio-Cortés said. “We are going to see if we can encourage dozens of communities or more to take on a particularly important challenge, bridging the gap that often develops between many students from low income communities and their peers.”
Watch the video from the All-America City Award presentation ceremony in Kansas City below, and watch individual videos from each All-America City on the NCL website. Read more about the announcement of the 2011 All-America City recipients.
