Preparing Students To Become Homeowners And Neighbors
Neighboring Academy Highlights
As part of the 2025 Kwanzaa Festival sponsored by Life Esteem, the Neighboring Academy was honored to receive the Nguzo Saba Award for exemplifying the 7 principles of Kwanzaa which are: 1 Umoja (Unity): Striving for unity in the family, community, nation, and race. 2 Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): Defining ourselves, naming ourselves, creating for ourselves, and speaking for ourselves. 3 Ujima (Collective Work & Responsibility): Working together to build up the community and solve problems collectively. 4 Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics): Building and maintaining our own businesses and profiting together. 5 Nia (Purpose): Making our collective vocation the building and developing of our community to restore its traditional greatness. 6 Kuumba (Creativity): Doing always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it. 7 Imani (Faith): Believing in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
WHAT IT IS
A Pathway for Home Ownership
When we show students a pathway to home ownership, we’re imagining a kind of education that doesn't only prepare them to go to college or get a job but to responsibly join a neighborhood. We’re teaching principals of neighboring. We’re building a foundation for a thriving community and investing in their future!
The Neighboring Academy creates specialized learning environments in partnership with schools to guide students along a proactive path towards home ownership.
“Neighboring” refers not only to the interpersonal relationships we have with those around us; but also to the ways that systems & structures relate to form neighborhoods.
The Neighboring Academy breaks cycles of poverty by creating a pathway to homeownership that combines local neighborhood capital with 21st Century skills at Steelton-Highspire for high school students.
HOW IT WORKS
Specialized Environment.
Contextual Education. Timeless Values.
We create spaces for specialized instruction to break cycles of poverty by combining local neighborhood capital with 21st Century skills empowering students to become responsible neighbors and homeowners.
We use design thinking to develop student's 21st Century skills so they can leverage different forms of local neighborhood capital to make an impact in their neighborhoods.
We partner with businesses and workforce development programs to give students opportunities to develop their 21st Century skills in local real world environments as well as within specialized modular makerspaces constructed with technologies like shipping containers and 3D printing.
Contact the Neighboring Academy
For more information on how your school or business can begin planning a partnership with the Neighboring Academy, share your interest with us.
