Our History, Our Roots
In 2010, 75 students from both Temple University surrounding North-Central Philadelphia neighborhoods and schools participated in a series of service-learning brigades to the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. Born out of the tension filled boundaries segregating these two communities, these hybridized groups each spent 9 days in the L9W participating in community organizing efforts and the transformation of vacant land into urban gardens. Each night, they gathered into “peoples circles” to analyze the various socio-economic and environmental issues they had witnessed in N.O, and discuss their relationship with parallel issues in North Philly.
Invigorated by these experiences, and inspired by the growing comradery of these once segregated groups, this diverse array of young people returned to Philly motivated to enact change in their own communities. Together, they founded the Philadelphia Urban Creators (PUC), and have since been on a mission to unite communities and youth from throughout North Philly and the rest of the city to collectively devise sustainable local solutions to the global problems impacting our city.
While a number of these original co-founders have since graduated and moved on from PUC, what this initial group was able to establish was a truly sustaiable system of local, and youth leadership. New young leaders are always being harvested and introduced into the core of the organization, and neighbors in the communities that we work in are always centrally engaged in the envisinoining and evolution of our projects. Together, we are developing partnerships with communities, schools, universities, urban farms, and social justice organizations throughout Philadelphia so that our rapidly growing network of energetic young people can become active in the city-wide effort to equitably develop Philadelphia’s various inner-city communities, from the “ground up”.