Working Together, We Can Take Our Neighborhoods to the Top!
On The Issues
Better Schools
Our kids are being short changed. You can help stop the pipeline to prison by improving our schools! Parents, grandparents and concerned community residents are coming together to advocate for policies that have proven effective at reducing the dropout rate and creating career and college readiness for students from struggling school districts.
Access to Health Care
Texas has the highest rate of uninsured families in the country! Finding quality, affordable and essential health care is a daily struggle in our neighborhoods. Overcrowding is the norm at community clinics, so preventative care becomes impossible, often times making emergency care the only health care available in low-income areas. TOP is fighting for community clinics in areas of rapidly growing population, fair policies to reduce hospital debt and proper implementation of the national health care reform bill in Texas.
Housing and Neighborhood Infrastructure
Too many Texas neighborhoods are crumbling! Low income neighborhoods disproportionately suffer for multiple reasons: decades of government neglect, red lining by the banks, and tough, natural climates, just to name a few. This leads to neighborhoods that already have decaying infrastructure becoming unlivable neighborhoods.
People are tired of watching their neighborhoods falls down after decades of neglect, only to see entire city blocks in their community, bulldozed to be replaced by high priced, luxury condominiums they cannot afford to live in. Taxpayer dollars are too often used to repave high-income neighborhood roads, while families in our neighborhoods rarely see their roads repaved, live everyday with leaks in their roofs, foundations crumbling, severe flooding, children walking in the streets instead of sidewalks and houses covered with FEMA tarps two years after the hurricane.
TOP is organizing neighborhood-by-neighborhood to make sure federal funds coming to Texas go to the neighborhoods most in need.
Local Hiring
Help fight for jobs in our neighborhoods! Minority communities have higher unemployment rates than the overall population, and the goal of this campaign is to change that. We need jobs that pay good wages and benefits, so that we can support our families and better our communities. With all of the tax dollars thrown at developers for new construction in our cities in Texas, we think taxpayers should get a return on that investment. That's why TOP, along with churches, trade unions, and other community organizations, is pushing for community benefits agreements with developers and government agencies in Dallas that will guarantee good jobs, local hiring and training opportunities in our communities.