| The Center for Urban Redevelopment and Empowerment (CURE) at Florida Atlantic University in Fort Lauderdale administers a COPC that targets its activities to three very low- and low-income communities in Broward County, Florida: Fort Lauderdale, Deerfield Beach, and Dania.
The target neighborhoods suffer from substantial physical decay, economic distress, and a disproportionately high crime rate. Most of the county's 12,000 welfare recipients are concentrated in these neighborhoods, which are highly segregated. The neighborhoods also have low levels of homeownership and high levels of unemployment.
Over 95 percent of the residents in each of the targeted communities is African American. The homeownership rate among these African Americans is less than 30 percent, compared to over 65 percent for whites in the county. The unemployment rate in the COPC target area is over 11 percent, compared to 5.6 percent for whites in Broward County.
The FAU COPC's main activities include providing three types of training programs to local residents:
Job training to develop the employment capacity of the unemployed and working poor.
Fair Housing Training to familiarize residents, builders, realtors, developers, landlords, and property managers with fair housing laws.
Micro-business training to help improve economic development, employment rates, and income levels in the project communities.
The COPC operates from three sites that are owned and managed by community partners. These partners include the Mount Bethel Human Services Corporation Inc., in Fort Lauderdale, the Housing Authority of Deerfield Beach, and the City of Dania. Another supporting partner is the Coordinating Council of Broward County, which acts as an umbrella organization for the largest governmental and quasi-governmental agencies in the county.
|
