Building a Healthy and
Thriving Community

We are community organizers breaking down barriers to healthy living and strengthening neighborhood stability in Austin’s Eastern Crescent

GAVA is a community-driven and resident-led movement of everyday folks leveraging their lived experience to shape a more equitable Austin.

GAVA organizes and mobilizes community power to reduce barriers to health while increasing institutional capacity to respond to the people most impacted by historic inequities.
Community-driven
Resident-led
Everyday folks

We envision a future in which a person’s neighborhood, income, race, ethnicity, primary language, and/or immigration status no longer serve as a predictor of health outcomes.

Why

Up to 80% of an individual’s health is determined by social factors including income, availability and distribution of local resources, and community culture.

While Austin is considered one of the nation’s healthiest cities, we experience large inequities in health outcomes in Austin’s Eastern Crescent, where racially and economically discriminatory policies and practices have resulted in inadequate investment and resourcing of community assets, creating barriers to healthy living in specific neighborhoods.

We also see that low-income communities of color are often economically displaced when improvements are achieved. Economic Development must be paired with anti-displacement efforts that center the well-being of all Austinites.

Community Leaders Supported by GAVA

Climate Navigators

These multilingual resident leaders from across North-Central, East, and South Austin, represent a powerful network of parents, neighbors, caretakers, and educators who have been trained as Climate Navigators in Spanish- and English-language preparedness curricula to better prepare themselves and their communities in times of extreme weather (heat, flooding, freezing temperatures, and fire). They collaborated with the University of Texas to create an online “resilience portal” to guide people, organizations, and networks in times of climate emergencies, and provide data for longterm policy decisions.

East Williamson Creek Adopters

After many generations of families along East Williamson Creek watched their greenbelt suffer from flooding, invasive species, and dumping, a network of neighbors began formally adopting the creek and collaborating with GAVA to beautify and steward the area into a nature trail for the whole community.  Donde corre el agua/Where the Water Runs is a Spanish speaking resident-led creek adopter project that has brought four City departments, dozens of residents, and the University of Texas School of Architecture together to develop a trail enhancement project to support creek health, reduce erosion, improve connectivity, and protect this wild space for Dove Springs with a goal to complete implementation by the end of 2026. Creek adopters host regular creek clean ups in order to maintain the space until the City formally installs the trail on site along with signage, seating, and a decorative entryway sign and mural on the flood detention wall, to make the green space more welcoming.

Food Justice Leaders - Food Cooperative Steering Committee

For the past decade, resident leaders have championed GAVA’s food access work over the years in a variety of community and school-based efforts to increase access to healthy food. Since 2023, a steering committee of nine residents and two organizational representatives from across Austin’s Eastern Crescent worked on behalf of GAVA—in partnership with the Austin Cooperative Business Association and the City of Austin Economic Development Department—to launch the Austin Community Owned Food Retail initiative to form a cooperative grocery store that serves communities with a variety of multilingual and multicultural backgrounds. The steering committee held meetings in English, Arabic, and Spanish. After collectively learning about cooperative business models and how to create a feasibility analysis with robust community engagement, they have now assembled a board of Directors for the co-op and have developed a business plan with a pilot program to start early 2025.

Early Childhood Advocates

A group of childcare providers, advocates, and Mayor Kirk Watson at the GAVA hosted Early Childhood Town Hall in November 2023

These local home-based child care providers, early childhood organizations, parents, and other allies in GAVA’s advocacy initiatives are rooted in improving all childcare providers’ economic well being and in turn, the health outcomes of our city’s youngest residents. They advocate for provider and family needs that impact the entire childcare sector while simultaneously acting as a major support network for working families in our communities. Their recent campaigns and successes through the ATX EC Grassroots Coalition include the passage of an expansion in childcare subsidies including the 2024 ballot initiative to expand childcare subsidies in Travis County as well as the complementary City Council initiative to allocate city funds for a childcare relief fund.

Community Coalition for Neighborhood Stability

CCNS is a group of resident leaders from various refugee communities in north and south Austin who have established their own nonprofit organization (recently granted 501(c)3 status) to serve the diverse needs of refugee households. Their activities include leadership development, healthy and culturally relevant food distribution, and long-term anti displacement and housing strategies. They are currently pursuing status as a community development corporation to start a community land trust (CLT) and are now participating in the city’s two-year CLT Accelerator program, developing skills to implement their vision of acquiring land and creating multigenerational affordable housing.

Contact

Please share your questions or comments with GAVA using the form below. For media inquiries or questions regarding your donation, please also use the form below and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

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